


Between These Cursed Walls

by chaos_and_havoc_live_rent_free_here



Category: Hannibal (TV), Lockwood & Co. - Jonathan Stroud
Genre: Alternate Universe - Lockwood & Co., Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Crack Treated Seriously, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Language, Ghosts, Hannibal Lecter is a Cannibal, Hannibal Lecter is a Ghost, Hannibal Lecter is a Mess, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Mutual Healing, My First Fanfic, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Someone Help Will Graham, Tags Are Hard, Tags May Change, Way too seriously, What Have I Done, Will Graham Has Nightmares, Will Graham is a Mess, Will Graham is...What is he?, occasionally, yay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:07:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 36
Words: 57,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24743593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaos_and_havoc_live_rent_free_here/pseuds/chaos_and_havoc_live_rent_free_here
Summary: The cold of the countertop begins to warm under his fingers. Will Hears. On the fringes of his vacant mind, he listens for something, feeling around in the dark. There is a strange fizzing sound, the sizzling of a pan. Bacon, or sausage perhaps? Fresh breakfast and spices. There is sunlight, he can hear the morning rising throughout the house. Muted voices, distant, happy chatter.Unconsciously, Will shifts his focus. The emotions come quickly, shooting up through the floor and into his body like an electric shock. It makes him shiver. He slips on a foreigner’s skin and feels. There is the quiet rush of joy, the elegant kind, when your hands have done something so many times that you’ve turned it into a kind of performance. A strange art. Dedicated to the enjoyment and honed perfection of a craft. Exhilarating and relaxing all at once.Second comes a wave of love, parental instincts, the need to mold and to nurture. To care for someone. Fatherly love for a daughter, perhaps—Touch is a tricky talent. The faint smell of old-new paper, and carpet and fresh fabric well-taken care of. Earthy, lazy impressions and hot tea in fine cups.———————In which Will hunts ghosts. Then he encounters Hannibal Lecter.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 95
Kudos: 203





	1. The Most Haunted House In Maryland

**Author's Note:**

> I used the Lockwood and Co. AU because it’s cool and I’m lazy. Go check out the books though, they’re great. Secondly, Price, Zeller, and Katz are early to mid-teens due to AU lore

The cameras flash. Voices of reporters blare like sirens as their owners begin to close in around the car. Their faces show faintly though the van’s tinted windows. Will closes his eyes and grimaces. He can feel Beverly watching him.

The escort that keeps the paparazzi at bay forces them to wait at lest twenty more minutes before they are allowed to enter the house. Curfew will set in soon, and, much to Will’s dismay, the jabbering of the crowd has not dispersed. Curfew is in ten minutes and no one had moved from their place. 

He sighs. Will grips the cold handle of the car door and it slides open with a familiar metallic  clunk . He seizes his backpack and a duffle from the very back seat and swings his legs out of the car, touching down on the curb. He’s getting out on the side of the van nearest the house, but the upswing of noise still rattles him. It rattles him every time.

Voices close in on him from all sides; the bombardment is enough to trigger a headache. The dying sunset stings his eyes. He keeps his head down and his eyes on his feet, forcing himself towards the house.  


It would be a cold day in hell when  Will Graham  of all people would give an interview. Reporters were alway too loud, too shiny and happy, they smiled too wide, too much, all the  _ fucking _ time. He’d rather be ghost-touched. 

Will can feel the malice emanating from the building itself, the strange sentient presence that stirs when you approach its doors. It becomes agitated. The souls that have been locked inside the house, so concentrated, so terribly trapped that no concept of the world outside exist to them are what give the house it’s malice. Some of the Visitors are like this.  


Those that remember their lives before, those who can maintain some semblance of normalcy even as they remain deceased, they reach out. They are lonely, so they reach out with dead, pale, thin fingers clawing at you, begging you to join them and to end their misery. And when they do, they pull you with more then just their hands. They make you want to join them. They want you to die. You want to die.

Will faces arms reaching out to him on both sides of the barricade. He chooses the dead. He does every time.

Will knows Jack and Beverly watch him each time they arrive at a house like this one, the way he ducks his head and leads the group out of a desire to reach the door. The cross the threshold with haste.  


You’re supposed to do that anyway, but Will hates the clashing voices of the people outside. He know why they crowd and clamor and claw at the barrier like the Visitors do. He nearly slips on the snow-dusted steps in his haste to reach to door.  


He realizes as he fishes through his pockets that Jack has the key. Will sighs. Against his better judgement, Will faces the crowd, focusing on Jack just a few paces behind him. He brushes past Will to unlock the door as Beverly comes up behind him, flanked by Price and Zeller. They close in around him, as if to protect him, when in reality he should be ushering them into the house.  


They are so young- _too young_ -to sacrifice their lives like this, but he too breaks the unspoken norms. Will shouldn’t be doing what he does. He should have stopped a long, long, time ago.

Will is the first to pass over the threshold, and the last one to survey the dusty, cobwebbed foyer. Will is the one to shut the door behind their group as they file into the house with their gear and their rapiers strapped to their belts. 

Will remembers when he wore one of those navy blue coats. He remembers the weight of the iron chains in his duffle and the sachets of iron and salt. He remembers the cool cylindrical comfort of the canisters of Greek Fire. Will shakes off the memories at the door, letting them slip out into the open like a flock of doves fleeing some unknown disturbances in the forest. 

Jack has already sent his team out into the house while the night is young to scope out a place where they can set up shop for the night. Will stares down the dimly lit hall, knowing it will be long. The house is too quiet. Will forces himself back to reality as the agents flash their flashlights through the hall, peeling off into separate rooms.  Will closes his eyes for a moment and lets himself Hear. Just a little bit.

There’s a windy sort of echo, a hole somewhere in the fabric of the house. He shuts himself down.

Zeller is first to arrive back, shortly followed by Beverly and Price. They all say the same thing, but Will isn’t really listening. His Sight is passable at most, but even he sees the frightening absence of death-glows. Cavities in reality. Holes. Dark, empty holes.

They say that the dining room will be best to set up in, and they have to move quickly, darkness will be setting in soon. Will is the first to sling a duffel bag over his shoulder and guess his way towards the dining room. He moves the duffles, but as they make it to the dining room he steps back.

Dropping his bag from his shoulders, Will unbuckles the straps and pulled out a thermos, twisting open the cap and draining some of the liquid. The warmth grounds him for a moment.

He watches as Jack sifts through a manila folder, flipping though papers, records, and notes in the dim light. Katz, Zeller, and Price strike matches and touch them to candle wicks, lighting the candles and setting them on the long table. They light lamps and flick on extra flashlights, gathering the light sources into one glowing mass.

Price digs out a pack of family size Oreos and peels back the plastic, taking two and biting into one. Jack disregards it, flipping open the folder. Zeller and Katz gather, taking cookies in turn, sipping from their thermoses. Will is the last to sit.

“Okay team, we’ve gone over this once, but we’ll do it again. This house is dangerous. Where Visitors are concerned, no one is safe, but with this house’s reputation we take no risks. We cut no corners. Do I make my self clear?” There’s an echo of  yeses  and  mm-hms  from around the table. Will does not speak.

Jack goes on to explain the history of the house, about how after the owner’s death (one shrouded in controversy and mystery, apparently) there was an upswing in paranormal activity in the house. Will loses the thread. He lets his mind settle and permits himself to dip his toes into the water just a bit. Just a bit. He can feel the gentle pull of the house, a tug that Will knows will lead him somewhere, at some point...but not know, not know.

“...not known how they got there, but they were ghost-touched. That’s about it, get your magnesium flares, two each, be careful with them. Price get the duffles, Zee, get the iron chains. Katz, you take the lead- Graham” Jack pauses and snaps twice near Will’s face. “Graham, you okay?”

“Mmh?” Will grunts, fighting against the anchors that pull him down into the house.

“I said, are you okay?”

“Mm...yeah, I’m good.” Jack pauses before gesturing to the doorway as his agents file out.

Will ducks through the doorway and into the house behind them. Into the night.


	2. (Un)welcome

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t quite know how frequently I’ll update, but since I have time on my hands, I expect to update pretty regularly. Just be prepared for the possibility of writer’s block.

The house of Hannibal Lecter is too quiet to  _ not  _ possess a presence. The walls and the dim shadows thrown across them make the ceiling look higher and the hallways look thinner. Just enough that you notice.

Just enough that you begin to feel like they’re closing in around you, like the walls in the darkened hallways into movie theaters.  The ones lined with fabric, the ones that bring forth that keening, buzzing background sound. Those halls will push just so on the sides of your head, so the only thing you can hear or see or feel is your lungs as they move beneath your rib cage just so and the muted hum of a heartbeat.

The long, arching hallways of the Lecter house simulate that same sound, only fainter. Uncomfortably distant. Beverly takes the lead into the kitchen, flanked closely by her colleagues. Will watches them from the doorway, feeling Jack’s eyes rake the back of his head and the weight of the room before him. Will slips into the kitchen.

Night has fallen in earnest now, and he knows the silence is just as palpable to him as it is to his fellows. The silence becomes oppressive, empty of the standard buzz the quiet carries. It’s empty. “Nine degrees during the sweep, five degrees now, Jesus...” Zeller jots down the temperature readings.  “Cold spot. Right here.” Price is standing somewhere along the shorter far edge of the kitchen island. The shadows on the walls creep higher still, despite the lack of light. Will feel the pull of the chain circle calling him. He wants to stand within it bounds, within the promise of safety.

Beverly approaches the cold spot, standing with the toes of her boots just grazing the line. Will watches her let go. Again the house calls to him, just a whisper, just an echo, but some part of Will wants it to be a breath of wind.

Katz’ breathing hitches as she comes out of the odd trance that accompanies Touch. She looks nauseated. Zeller prepares to write. “...There’s joy, the owner of the house loved being here, uhm, and then there’s a shift...I can’t quite place it. And then there’s rage, blinding rage. It’s...incredibly potent.” She backs away from the cold spot and Will knows she’s been well and truly rattled by what she felt.

See, the thing with Touch is you don’t really _know _ anything, there are no solid facts except the rush of sensations that make you certain. You don’t know what you’re certain of until after the wave has broken and rushed to shore, but you know. Sometimes it’s valuable. Sometimes it’s not.

Sometimes, you become so lost, so entirely entangled in the emotions, that reality _really_ doesn’t matter. You take the place of whoever felt such potent rage or fear or joy, and you do more than feel. _You_ _ are. _ The strongest ghosts will do that to you.

Speaking of ghosts, the cold spot has started to shine; a death-glow growing brighter by the second. They are almost out of time. Beverly steps back, giving Will adequate space to adjust to the room. Price and Zeller stand by the door, rapiers drawn with the sharp scrape of metal. Beverly joins them, and Will can’t help but notice her hands shaking.It makes him nervous. But now is not the time for apprehension. That left him at the door.

Carefully, but not cautiously, Will moves towards the death glow shining ever-brighter. Zeller pulls out a pair of sunglasses. The click of the plastic is uncomfortably amplified.

Raising a hand, Will gingerly brushes his fingers over the island’s cold surface, acclimating the the room around him. For the first time tonight, he wades into the water in earnest. Slowly, the thoughts and emotions left over from the night’s beginning start to drain from his skull; a drip transforming into a steady stream. They puddle at the shore, seeping gently into the sand and drying up, leaving little more than a flecked beige tint. Will’s head is empty, but not for long.

The cold of the countertop begins to warm under his fingers. Will Hears. On the fringes of his vacant mind, he listens for something, feeling around in the darkness.  There is a strange fizzing sound, the sizzling of a pan. Bacon, or sausage perhaps? Fresh breakfast and spices. There is sunlight, he can hear the morning rising throughout the house. Muted voices, distant, happy chatter.

Unconsciously, Will shifts his focus. The emotions come quickly, shooting up through the floor and into his body like an electric shock. It makes him shiver. He slips on a foreigner’s skin and _feels._ There is the quiet rush of joy, the elegant kind, when your hands have done something so many times that you’ve turned it into a kind of performance. A strange art. Dedicated to the enjoyment and honed perfection of a craft. Exhilarating and relaxing all at once.

Second comes a wave of love, parental instincts, the need to mold and to nurture. To care for someone. Fatherly love for a daughter, perhaps-Touch is a tricky talent. The faint smell of old-new paper, and carpet and fresh fabric well-taken care of. Earthy, lazy impressions and hot tea in fine cups.

Last comes an unexpected twist, one that forces all of the wind out of Will’s lungs. A uncomfortable, seeping cold so deep it burns through him and into the marrow of his bones. Love devolves into despair. Rage. Fear, a detached kind. And the distant but unsettling feeling of panic and an unnatural suffocating. A filling kind of smothering feeling, like sinking, like  _drowning_.  Panic rises through Will’s chest like the water rushing around him. Crashing. Weighing him down into the ocean.  He is drowning. Falling. He is surely going to die. His bones are made of iron and his joints are rusty and unmoving. He will die like this, unable to stop the ringing of the heavy thumps of a stag’s hooves in his ears like a heartbeat frantically trying and failing to overextend it’s owner’s time and then—

_ ”- Will. Will.” _ Beverly’s increasingly urgent voice pulls the plug on the ocean in which Will is lost. “Will!” He jerks awake, shivering, sweating, looking feverishly around the room. The sudden lack of blockage in his throat and lungs is enough make him hyperventilate. Was it there anyway, or was it a figment of his own hallucinations, a remnant of his gift? Katz, Zeller, and Price are standing on the edge of the chain circle opposite a glowing mass. Will is only partially aware of the fact that his knees have given out.

The abrupt return to consciousness comes too fast, and just in time. Previously, he took little notice of the house’s apparent emptiness: the cold of the fireplace in the dining room, the dust, spiders, and spiderwebs on the foyer floor. But the Lecter house is far from dead, as is apparent only ten paces behind him. A shade, a sliver of blue other-light, that’s all it is, but it moves in the spidery sort of manner of a deer, one that’s picking through the brush with its head down.

Jack is in the doorway just as fast as Will forces his legs under him, dodging the rapidly solidifying specter by mere inches. Everyone sees it freeze for a second as Will scrambles past it, but only for a second. He dives against the wall, watching as Katz, Price, and Zeller surround it, rapiers at the ready. The mass freezes again, right over the cold spot, and solidifies entirely.

Will presses into the wall, hoping somehow he might be able to pass through it as he feel to ghost-lock settling over the room. The only remnant of a long-lost young woman stands by the island. Will can’t see her face, but he knows somehow that the detached fear he felt belongs to _her_. Her hair shines, highlights appearing from some long-lost light source that doesn’t exist anymore. She stumbles back, convulsing?-no, _fighting_ an invisible presence.

The agents close in still further, as they watch her thrash and pitch forward, a spray of dark plasma erupting from her neck. Will grimaces as the shriek hits his ears. Zeller takes a swing as the spray as it completes its arc towards him, keeping any potential plasma burns from reaching him. Price and Katz each take a swipe at the ghost, dropping iron to quell the spirit. A salt bomb explodes, it’s contents sparkling white-green. The sparks fly outwards, away from the apparition in a gust of air. The ghost screams in earnest now, with true rage,  as it turns towards Will, eyes empty and pale and wide. Time slows to a crawl.

Will reckons she can’t be more then nineteen. There’s a slash across one side of her neck, the opening from which the plasma erupted. New ribbons of it shot out, staining the island countertop and making it sizzle angrily. Something dark had seeped into her shirt long, long time ago.

The ghost of Abigail Hobbs lets loose one last ear-splitting, anguished wail, and vanishes in an explosion of wind.


	3. They Know

Abigail Hobbs’ indirect but violent appearance and departure boded ill for the rest of the evening. Will knows they’ll run in to trouble; more than ever he feels they aren’t properly prepared. He’s seen Katz, Zeller, and Price work as one very finely tuned machine and he harbors no doubts that they are experts at what they do, but Will can’t shake the feeling that even they’ll be caught off-guard by whatever might be coming.

Maybe it’s the leftover rush of adrenaline from the fight with Hobbs, but the kitchen hasn’t settled. If anything, it seems to buzz with even more energy.

The kitchen’s occupants have no time to collect themselves before they are buffeted yet again by a surge of air, sending everyone stumbling back. Again, the blinding, cold, other-light soars across the room, freezes, stutters, and solidifies.

Again, Abigail Hobbs shrieks, spraying great gouts of ectoplasm across the room, staining the walls and empty cabinets. She repeats her ritual with more instance this time, she is panicking. She does not vanish as the trio slash at her opaque body _this time_.

The wall at Will Graham’s back grows cold and he ducks half-way across the room not one moment too soon. A faint curtain of mist shining with other-light passes straight through the wall. Will snatches up a spare rapier from one of the duffles and swings at the haze slowly taking shape.

Abigail Hobbs lets out another anguished cry, sending plasma spitting across the room like shrapnel. As Will parries one particularly large dollop of burning plasm, he begins to hear the vicious mingling voices of other Visitors. Other people trapped within the walls of the house. Again, Will feels the tug of the house’s center, the windy echo of some hidden cavern. _Some_ _ one _ _pulls at him_.

The voices grow louder and more insistent as the shadows on the walls climb higher. They begin to take on a life of their own, tearing themselves from their bonds. Abigail Hobbs sends as another current of air throughout the room; Will can feel her panic and her rage-no, no, that’s _desperation_. An emotion that pulls at you forces you to gravitate towards her. Jack is buffeted back through the doorway.

The voices are clearer than ever now, and it makes Will’s head sting as he cuts down one materializing mist after the other. A charred face pops out of the wall beside his head, reaching for him with one blackened arm, whispering to him, calling him. Will slices the limb away and the ghost wails in agony.

Abigail Hobbs crumples onto the floor, screaming with enough psychic energy that Katz, Price, and Zeller all wince, trying their best to remain conscious through the psychic bombardment. Will twists around to meet the face of a Wraith, his grotesquely bloated torso stuffed with rotting flowers. The ghost screeches at him as he slashes through its middle and it backs partially through a wall.

Another bursts from the floor-well, half of one. He crawls rapidly across the floor on his hands, dragging his intestines behind him. Beverly chucks a salt bomb at him, sending him reeling back. Two more erupt in a splash of ectoplasm, lurching towards Price on uneven legs. One has wild, unkept hair that paints plasma stains behind him, the other is a Limbless, shuffling slowly after Zeller who is fighting off Abigail’s increasingly aggravated advances.

There is one fuzzier apparition, just barely visible through the chaos, staring down Abigail as she flickers, his full, round cheeks now pale with death. He gravitates towards her, his head positioned at a rakish angle on his neck, as if broken.

Through the shouting of the living and the wailing, mingling voices of the dead, Will shouts to his colleagues, “We have to leave,  _ we have to leave  now! Your duffles, get the duffle bags! _ ”  He watches Zeller reach for a canister of Greek Fire and Will knows that the choice he’s going to make might kill them. Lunging, he snatches the magnesium flare from Zee’s hand. “Don’t risk it, go, just go!”

Will snatches a bag from the floor as two faint apparitions begin to rapidly materialize in the doorway: two girls no older than Abigail must have been when she died, one in a nightgown and the other in nothing but undergarments. Both raise their dissipating arms towards the escapees, as if welcoming them with a cold embrace. Beverly slices them into ribbons as she staggers out.

The voices in Will’s head have risen to malevolent screams, pressing against his eardrums to the point where they begin to bleed. He can’t see straight down the corridor. The four lurch into the dining room, finding Jack trying to fiend off the Limbless he can’t see. He’s stuck dancing around whatever cold emanates from the ectoplasm tendrils feeling their way around the room.

Price, acting on instinct, chucks what remains of his iron and salt at the apparition, giving Jack the room to run. The thing cringes away from the green sparks that fly in it’s direction.

They grab what they can and spill into the foyer, fighting off the cobwebs and ectoplasm wisps that trail behind them. The hallway seems to stretch and the air in Will’s lungs seems to grow thinner and thinner as the ghost-lock forces it’s to way under his skin again. The doors are impossibly far and the strap of the duffle is weighing him down, he’s drowning again, he’s cold and the open, welcoming arms of the ghost-girls will feel warm and safe if only he gives in...

And suddenly, the heaviness in Will’s limbs lifts. The air is still thin, but it’s cold and crisp and it clears his head. He knows he slips on the frozen steps, but he couldn’t care less about what he’s broken or injured. If he’s bleeding, it doesn’t matter. All that matters now is that he’s alive.

Will is unaware of how and who gets down the steps first, but he knows what to do when he reaches the van. His body is on fire, but he can’t give up now, not while he still has breath. Clawing the door open, he fumbles with the radio in the front seat, calling for medics and slumping onto the cushion.

He knows not when they will arrive due to the snow and ice, but when they do, the lights of the ambulance will illuminate the front lawn in the same way the house’s windows would throw it into warm relief if magnesium flare fires were to be lit within it’s walls.


	4. His Dinner’s Gone Cold

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FBPI - Federal Bureau of Paranormal Investigation

Backup won’t be needed. They would have come too late anyway. Jack will end up biting his head off at some point, but Will won’t have the heart to care. He knows he’s right to get them out now, or they might not have left with their lives. The house is still agitated, Will can feel it while a medic bandages his wrist, muttering something about a sprain and sticking a needle-full of adrenaline in him, just to be safe.

Three ambulances were sent to the house after the call, and soon it was found that they were  very much needed . Everyone who’d dared enter that kitchen had sustained moderate to severe ectoplasm burns and Beverly’s hand had gone blue and was starting to swell and spread when the EMTs pulled her away for inspection. Will watches as the ambulance peels out onto the icy streets and vanishes into the darkness around a bend in the road.

The house’s front has been thrown into the sharp relief he anticipated, almost like the light of the daytime. The lights and the noise and the sheer bustling  energy  drown out the house’s vile whispers and the adrenaline shot keeps him awake through the ride to the hospital, along with a cup of coffee that’s mediocre at best.

The ER is blessedly empty tonight, but Will gets no sleep. Beverly got ghost-touched by the Wraith with abdominal flower display and sprained an ankle to boot. The doctors have told him that she’s stable. It doesn’t stop Will worrying. Price and Zeller made it out relatively unharmed, but both took hits on their falls down the icy steps: Jimmy broke his nose, and Zee cracked a tooth landing on the icy stone steps. Will watches them sit together in silence at the opposite end of the ER waiting room, bandaged and both too wiped out to do anything but try to stay awake.

Will guesses it’s somewhere around six in the morning when he’s let out and even then Jack (who only got out with  stitches  Will might add,) drags him back to the FBPI offices for a meeting and report filing. It turns out, the hospital phoned the Bureau when they were radioed in an kept them up to date on the goings on at the Lecter house. Will isn’t surprised, Jack’s team are unquestionably talented, but having the Bureau on one’s back constantly is not ideal for one’s mood.

Will lets Jack do most of the talking, loosing the thread of the conversation somewhere around how the kitchen and become a hotbed of unanticipated Type Twos and reliant Type Ones within five minuets. Will says the bare minimum of what he needs to, corroborating the statement and giving details on the course of events with as few words as he can.

He makes a point of emphasizing the fact that there was  _no way in hell_ a team of even the best operatives could have taken on a surprise attack of Type Twos like that in such a confined space without putting significant risk to their lives, weather by using flares indoors or the ghosts themselves posing the threat.

In reality, Will wants to get home to his dogs and and actual meal. And a nap. His point still stands, but he reflects that the meeting really could have waited. Luckily, the Bureau is swayed by their arguments and lets Jack’s team off for four days with compensation to the agent’s families for their injuries. Will has never left a building faster, haunted or otherwise.

The drive back to his house is uneventful which proves to be both a blessing and a curse. Will hasn’t slept in hours and the prospect of a nap is incredibly inviting, but there is always the risk of nightmares, the chance that the phantoms Will fights will come back to haunt him from beyond the places they’re trapped. They can’t hurt him, but that doesn’t make much difference. It takes a while to process and let go, but Will doesn’t really have the energy to care as he pulls up to his house.

The snow is beginning to melt as the sun rises higher in the sky. His dogs are excited to see him as always, and they give him the energy to amble around his yard for a while before sitting breathlessly on the steps, still finding it in himself to smile wearily. Will then herds his dogs back into the house again, feeds them, and changes into something more fitting for sleep. 

Will’s free time is passed amicably enough-fishing, playing with his dogs-that is until Jack comes calling again only three days into his time off. The research team has found something that might explain the overabundance of visitors they encountered. Grudgingly, Will makes the drive back to the offices, only to find Katz, Price, and Zeller all up and about in one of the large meeting rooms, sifting through documents and files.

Jack ushers him into a seat at the table and prepares to fill him in. “We may have found an answer as to why the house was so full. The last owner of the house, one Dr. Hannibal Lecter. We had a large team do a full sweep of his house and it didn’t take long to find out what might have happened. Have you eaten anything lately?”

“Oh, I’ve seen too many Wraiths and Raw-Bones in my time to care.”

“Well, you might wanna start caring, ‘cause they found evidence of several murders and cannibalisms committed in house. It seems that the not-so-good doctor’s ghost has drawn in the ghosts of his victims, think a black hole of sorts.” Jack stands and behind pulling papers and blown-up photos of very old and rotten-looking meat. Will can practically smell the decay.

“We’ve identified human kidneys, intestines, lungs, and other organs. Seems like this guy new what he was doing when he was disposing of his bodies.”

“And Abigail Hobbs?”

“We knew she would be there and she’s the reason this house made it onto our radar. Her case is your typical murder victim Specter, but almost of the others you saw we had no idea were there. There was a Franklyn Froideveaux that was killed in the house during an appointment with Dr. Lecter, and it was revealed after he died that he had killed Franklyn as well as Abigail. Lecter was clearly very clever. For all we know, there could be bones in the walls of the house.” Will sifts through the rest of the papers, glancing over photos of rotting organs, and missing persons case files from recent previous decades. “You think these might be victims?”

“They all fit a loose profile we created of Lecter’s probable ideal victim. They all had some previous connection to him, possibly met him at least in passing, probably had a professional connection to him....” Will pauses as he flips through a case file on a late-twenties after-school camp worker who’d been one of the last to vanish. “Jack, are you thinking of going back?”

“...Yes. And you’re coming with.”

“Jack-“

“Will, what you do in those houses not only helps our operatives but helps close cases. If there really are more volatile entities in the house Katz, Zeller, and Price will be there.” Will sighs. Jack is right, Will knows he’s right, but is doesn’t make him any happier. Jack continues. “They‘ll be briefing another team of senior operatives as well as their own teams on the details of the case. And it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on your rapier skills too.”

”Just in case?”

”Just in case.”


	5. Windy Echos

For the next month, Jack’s teams are working restlessly. Briefing, organizing, research. No one stands still for the next four weeks, including Will. Jack has him helping the research teams, identifying faces of the dead he saw in the house. They never look the same.

Most of the victims were not, in fact, disappeared, but unsolved and rather gruesome murder cases who’s perpetrator had not been identified. The flower man had been crucified on the trunk of a tree. The one-legged Wraith had been found amongst a truly horrific number of bodies, all perfectly preserved in a sort of human mural.

The burnt face in the wall had been framed for murder after a she’d been found jaundiced and diagnosed with Cotard’s Syndrome by Lecter. She died in an accident that was never an accident. It makes Will feel sick.

The faces look more real to him the the photographs, the skin, however pale, looks like  skin.  There is a certain texture that conveys the authenticity of life in a corpse, however dead, that a Visitor doesn’t have. The lips may have long turned cold and blue, the cheeks may have lost their rosy tint, the lungs may never fill with laughter again, but still they feel as though they should breathe. The dead are not so swiftly turned into objects. They aren’t _things_ the way Visitors are.

Visitors are gaunt and hollow-looking, a shell of a life now long gone.  They should not breathe. Connected to objects that remain where they shouldn't, maybe that’s why they feel so artificiality alive. They really aren’t, but it will never cease to be jarring. T hey steal breath from the world around them, persisting for some seemingly unknowable reason.

It’s why they call it the Problem. The epidemic of ghosts has been raging since before Will was born. People have lived with it for decades. That’s exactly it. They live with it. They can do nothing but keep it at bay, so they move on. Will can’t.

When they reach the house for the second time, there are no reporters. No cameras. No clamoring voices and pressing bodies. There is only the rumbling sound of vans rolling up and braking against the curb. Booted feet not yet old enough to leave the nest, yet somehow permitted to put themselves on the front line.

Will has always found the weight of that sound wrong. It never feel heavy enough, they’re still children. They aren’t heavy enough. The low chatter, the shuffling of duffle bags and the low scrape of metal are all that fill the air as the sun sets and the cold sets in. It’s just background noise.

Will know’s he’s become more attuned to the house’s unique frequency; he can hear it over the hum of the senior operatives shouting at their teams to get in line and the last-minute checks of chains and salt-bombs. He watches Beverly directing her agents as they collect themselves. The bandage on her hand has been removed and the ghost-touch cleared. She’ll be fine.

But the night air smells foul. The house isn’t right. These house are never right, but this one just seems to be off-kilter, like the building isn’t as structurally sound as it was the last time Will was here. It settles in a way it shouldn’t. The windows look out so Will can look in. He’s brought crashing down to earth by a tap on his shoulder. Jack is there. “Can you look, Will?”

“...”

“Can I trust you to look?”

“Yes.” Will says it with a conviction he doesn’t have. With that, Jack starts directing five teams into the house, one by one. Groups of four, three junior operatives and one senior, all tuning into the house’s noise. The creaks and groans of the floorboards. The sigh of breath in the walls. The voices.

Will files into the house with Beverly’s team, dipping his toes into the oil spill again.


	6. I Know You’re Here

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so the layout of Hannibal’s house is wack. Clearly his office in is a different place than his house, but I heard in an interview that they’re connected somehow by a tunnel or passageway of some sort and for convenience, that’s how this is going to go.

The house’s oppressive silence isn’t broken by the shuffling of feet and the quiet brushing away of spiderwebs. It’s the kind of underwater quiet, where the water isn’t moving and that buzz in your ears is silenced. It’s as oppressive as it was when he first heard it.

There’s oil in the water when Will wades in and it collects near his ankles, staining them dark and shiny. The knot is his stomach clenches tighter. He wants to vomit. With shaking hands, Will unscrews the cap of his insulated water bottle and takes a long sip, savoring the cold and the temporary respite from an uneasy stomach.

It gives him the energy to look back down the foyer as the team before them files through and into another room. There are eight registered and fully qualified operatives to be searching the first floor-the other three teams will take the second-and still Will feels uneasy. There is something different about the house tonight. Something worse. He can’t put his finger on it or tell if it’s just nerves, but Will’s gut is telling him that no one should be here. They should have left it alone.

The house is restless and it’s inhabitants will be waking, especially since they’ve been disturbed in recent weeks. They hate it. Will feels that agitation in every house. “Will? Hey...” Beverly snaps a few inches from his face, bringing Will back to reality. “You good?”

“Mm...Yeah.”

She regards him with a look he doesn’t like, but it’s not there for long as she gives soft-spoken commands to her team. Will knows that in two years, she’ll make an excellent supervisor. She could be like Jack one day. All conviction and confidence and keen eyes. Would he have done that, had his Talent not persisted?

He wonders about the future he might have had as he begins to listen to the house shudder and groan and knows it’s occupants are stirring, and the windy echo...it makes the hairs on his neck stand straight and ice crawl under his skin. They’re taking the kitchen again, in the hopes that the other investigative team on this floor might draw the attention of other Visitors and lessen their workload.

Katz’s team is setting up the heavy-duty chains, the iron ones adorned with simple silver designs. They take the room’s temperature, just like they always do. Will leaves the unvarnished rapier at his belt while Beverly and her team pulls their swords and unclip salt bombs with added iron fragments for extra power. They stand in formation along the edge of the chain circle, poised and wound like springs ready to fly at the slightest hint of an apparition.

Will lets the sounds of other agents in the next room and the nervousness lighting up his brain die. Dripping out of his skull so it puddles near his feet. He is empty as the oil crawls up his legs and he wades deeper. Again, he reaches for the countertop of the island and the emotions hit him, all at once.

There is no joy, no fatherly affection. Only blinding rage. Betrayal. Will feels the distant, disembodied panic, the hurt, like someone pouring salt into the cavity of the rib cage, into the heart. The emotional pain has torn a hole between the world of the living and the realm of the dead.

Will feels the jittery desperation before Abigail appears, and he whirls around to be faces with a misty shade, shivering in the corner and advancing with increasing purpose. “Abigail...please.” Will hardly knows what he’s asking. The voices are clawing at the edges of his hearing. He motions for Beverly’s team to lower their salt bombs. They hold firm. “Abigail...”

 _“H e k n e w . . . e x a c t l y . . . h o w t o c u t m e . . .”_ The shadows on the wall are rising and Will knows they’ll soon be out of time.

_**“H e k n e w . . . !“** _

“Is he...Hannibal Lec-“

The ghost of Abigail Hobbs shrieked, solidifying and streaking through the air towards the death-glow on which Will was standing. A sudden gust of air whirled throughout the room, forcing him around the island to back against the fridge. Will can hear the whispers of the Limbless and Wraith trapped in there. Without pause for thought, one of the agents sent a salt bomb her way, and she shriveled back into the corner.

The shadows on the wall began to fade, but the voices grow in number and volume. Beverly’s team give him a patronizing look. “Had to uhm, agitate her. She’s desperate to find some one who might release her.” Will’s legs are shaking, he realizes, as he pulls his water bottle hour and takes another long sip, leaning against the fridge. “She’s powerful, but losing her touch. Sh-she can’t hold on to her own identity, I think.”

Apparently, Will swallows a little too much, too fast, as some of his water spills onto the floor, running down—wait. “Beverly...” One of the agents steps out of formation to examine the spill. “There is something here, ma’am.” Silently, Beverly motions for her agents to cover their weak points at Will begins to feel across the floorboards on his knees. “Anyone got a flashlight?” Will feels around in air above him and comes into contact with a small, cool cylindrical object.

Pulling it down and clicking it on, Will does his best to vet the floorboards as efficiently as he can. The light drowns out the psychic noise and he’s feeling, feeling, feeling for any dip or hollow echo-there. Will clicks off the light and hands it blindly back to the operative. Digging his fingers into the minuscule divide between the boards, he tugs with all his might—and a trapdoor swings free.

Will glances at Beverly in the dark, who immediately motions for one of the agents to follow her. The others close in tighter around Will as she ducks out of the kitchen. Moments later, Will hears the thumping of feet on stairs, and a team from the second floor arrives to take the kitchen. One of them dashes out, and Will can hear the opening of the house’s door as the agent relays what they’ve found to Jack, or at least that’s what Will assumes. Beverly hauls the chains from the floor and gives the signal to her team. They begin to descend in an orderly fashion down the cobwebbed, dust-clogged steps. Will is the last to go down, leaving the trap door open behind him.

Though the night is still relatively young and the Visitors are only just waking, Will immediately knows this is the source of the stench of the house, the vile, ugly smell. One of awareness. The house’s true evil knows they’re here. It makes Will shiver as the muddled water closes over his head.

Beverly and her team trod slowly this time, distraught by the creeping shadows of whatever vile devices lay hidden in the dark. Crusted blood, things they don’t want to see. The objects that draw your eyes like a corpse, forcing you to look when you never wanted to. They don’t shine their flashlights around the room.

“Beverly...” Will calls though the dark. The windy, freezing echo is roaring in his ears now, blowing his hair and the stench of age around the room. “You hear it to?” Beverly whips around towards the direction of Will’s voice. “The echo-“

“I know, I know.” Beverly’s team position themselves around Will as he begins to feel across the walls, empty walls that don’t have tables against them, walls that might contain a hidden cavity. He listens with his hands, waiting for the telltale prick of icy cold. And it comes, sharp and fast, like a sudden gust of wind on a wintry night brushing against the trees.

Will splays his hands across the wall, pushing on both sides. In the dark, if anyone were to come down here, they would never think to look for a door. Even if they thought a rectangular silhouette might have appeared on the wall, they might brush it off as a trick of the light. Just the dark playing tricks on their eyes. Will can feel the wall’s emptiness, the cavity behind it and sure enough, once he puts his back into it, the door comes free, swinging open with a rolling billow of dust.

The windy echo in Will ears dies down by a fraction, but the cold drops further and further. This was not on the house’s blueprints. The hallway descending into blackness. How far did it go? This basement room is empty of any psychic voice or imprint, except the sound of billowing gusts of wind.

Will can feel the air tickle his face, or maybe it’s just the good doctor welcoming them in for dinner.


	7. Curled in the Corner and Cold as Death (pt. 1)

The off-white flashlight beams cut neatly through the darkness. The dust is beginning to settle. One of the operatives fishes around in his pocket for a moment before withdrawing his hand to reveal a door stopper, probably wood with an iron or silver core, Will thinks. Just to be safe.

No psychic traces, odd enough for this house in particular, but the basement doesn’t feel malicious in that sense. No one died here. Bodies may have been housed here, but no one perished in this room.

The uneasiness Will feels here is like eyes, eyes in the spaces on walls between table and shelf, eyes in the corners of the vast room, eyes on the half-shadowed tools hidden out of sight. Eyes, eyes, eyes, all of them watching. Beverly takes the lead down the hall, flashing a beam of light every twenty seconds or so. She moves cautiously and Will doesn’t blame her as he draws his own rapier.

This was not predicted. This hallway didn’t appear on any blueprint or map of the house. It was, in comparison to the rest of the building, bland for what Will could see. Smooth floors of concrete and bare walls, so unlike the wallpapered and painting adorned corridors of the house above. It makes Will jittery. The feeling of being watched is growing steadily in strength and the windy echo still billows in his ears.

Will loses track of how long the passage is and how long the five of them have been down there, walking endlessly. It can’t have been more than a few minutes. He begins to fret over the possibility of a Visitor. The hallway is just wide enough for two people to walk side by side, and if a fight broke out their chances of being ghost-touched were high given the small space.

But they’ve encountered no death-glows, no partial apparitions, no nothing. There is no sign of anything malicious except for the echoing wind, and even that has begun to feel real. The air is stale and cold, dry like dusty books and empty rooms left solitary for too long. Like old paper...

Will isn’t paying attention as he bumps into one of Beverly’s agents. They’re standing in the corridor, still as stone figures in the cool light of their flashlights, and one of the junior operatives has hers pointed at the ceiling. Coated in a soft layer of dust and fine spider-spun webs is a aged wooden set of stairs leading up to a trap door. It’s outline is barely visible in the darkness, but one of the agents is cutting through the cobwebs to get to it.

A spider or two falls from the ceiling as the operative climbs up the ladder, cautions and clearly not overly confident in it’s structural soundness. She hands her rapier down to one of her fellows and braces her back against the door with her feet on the third-highest rung — and the hinges swing with a deafening squeal in the silence.

She flips back the hatch as gently as she can what with it’s weight and size, brushing the dust off of her jacket and webs out of her hair. One by one, they climb carefully up the ladder and out into what seems to be an empty closet. As Will sticks his head through the opening, he hears someone trying the knob and forcing the door open.

As he brushes the durst off of himself, the smell hits him again. The awareness, the spine-tingling sense of eyes. It’s impossibly strong here, so pungent that the operative closest to him, a boy of around fourteen, looks around at the corners of the room, checking irrationally for an eyeball somewhere. They can feel it, all of them can feel it.

Will is the last into the hall, unfamiliar with the building. This is bad, very, very bad. This was never on any map of Lecter’s house, and yet...and yet. They try each door they find in turn, the group with their backs to the one trying the handle, just in case, rapiers raised. Just in case.

No death-glows, no ghost-lock, no mist. And still the awareness, the sensation of unseen eyes watching from the corners persists. Will wants to turn his head in every direction, cast a light in the darkest of corners, but he can’t. He’ll deprive them of their Senses, leaving them vulnerable to attack.

A staircase presents itself, looming out of the shadows somewhere within the unfamiliar structure. One after another, the make their way up, careful to leave space between each other by a few steps so as not to trap themselves. Despite the complete lack of anything signaling the presence of a Visitor, someone is clearly here.

A breath of wind brushes Will’s neck and he turns hastily, finally cracking. There is no one. The air was warm, he swore it was, fresh from a pair of lungs. But there is no one behind him to breathe.

The group steps out onto the landing and heads straight for the door at the end of the hall. Maybe Will’s seen one too many movies, or maybe it’s just the light, but the hall feels like it lengthens as they pad slowly down it, the walls arching higher. There are no voices this time. The door swings open when Beverly tries the knob.

As the group files in one by one, they spread out onto a strange sort of raised platform. The sight of the room takes Will’s breath away.

It is vast, the size of a small theater, with large, heavily-curtained windows stretching the height of the far wall. They are, in fact, standing on a mezzanine, and to their backs are shadowed bookshelves with tomes upon leather-bound tomes, copies and prints of books and epic poems written centuries ago. Will has no time to inspect the titles, but by taking a glance he suspects some are foreign.

The smell of aged paperand fine furniture fills the room, not unlike a that of bookstore, of rugs and silence broken by the flicking of pages. The balustrade that lines the mezzanine is made of a fine, dark wood, as is a rolling ladder perched right at his feet. There are even finer strands of spider silk stretching between the gaps. There is undisturbed dust coating the rungs and sides, and multiple spiderwebs branch from it.

Will sees that underneath the mezzanine, there are still more bookshelves hidden by curtains of shadow. There is the faint outline of a carpet sprawling across the floor, untouched and untroubled, left alone for too long. Things fester that way, left alone, restlessness grows. There is a lounger near the far wall, soft angles made softer by dust.

Against one dark wall, a statuette sits cloaked by a slanting shadow. A deer perhaps, or an elk? The head of the animal has broken off of the dark figurine, sitting somewhere against the side of the pedestal upon which it’s counterpart rests. It’s the only thing in the room that feel out of place. It’s wrong.

A couch in one of the corners catches Will’s eye, some pale shade indistinguishable in the darkness. Along the walls portraits are hung, fuzzed by shadow and dust. Even so, Will is sure their detail is magnificent, if only he could see. There is a desk, the closest piece of furniture to them, large and magnificent, a few papers scattered artistically across its surface. A book lays open to a random page, papers rising gently from their fellows nearest to the open ones.

There are two chairs in the exact center of the room, sat directly across from each other, and the cold in the room is rolling off of them in waves. Their angles look sharper, their metal arm rests more menacing, even at this distance. Seated next to them are two matching glass side-tables. None have a speck of dust on them. No spiders, no cobwebs, no signal that a Visitor may lurk there.

Except for the faint glow. The ghostly, freezing white-blue shine of other-light. It’s faint, barely there, but it encases an object leaning back in the chair. It is still and pale as the whitest marble, but despite the other-light, the details stand out clear as day.

A man sits in the chair, not lazily, but relaxed, waiting silently for someone, staring unblinkingly across at the other chair. His hair is very well-trimmed and combed back with care and he is cleanly shaven. His suit is clearly very well-fit and expensive, the faint stripes on dark fabric betraying some hint of long-lost color. A patterned tie on solid, dark red, perhaps, when he wore it around his house, around those who breathed with him. A well-dressed, eccentric man sits in the chair in the center of the room.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s head snaps up to properly view the guests he did not invite. 


	8. Curled in the Corner and Cold as Death (pt. 2)

_ A man sits in the chair, not lazily, but relaxed, waiting silently for someone, staring unblinkingly across at the other chair. His hair is very well-trimmed and combed back with care and he is cleanly shaven. His suit is clearly very well-fit and expensive, the faint stripes on dark fabric betraying some hint of long-lost color. A patterned tie on solid, dark red, perhaps, when he wore it around his house, around those who breathed with him. A well-dressed, eccentric man sits in the chair in the center of the room. _

_ Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s head snaps up to properly view the guests he did not invite.  _

———————

The turn of his head is so swift, so clean and brutal that Will expect the crack of bone to ring through the frigid silence. The sudden motion scares him into the realization that  ghost-lock  is setting in. The chill of the room, the eyes in every corner, watching. They pin him down lie a butterfly in glass. Life is delicate. There is an unnatural weight in his limbs.

“Beverly, ghost-lock.”

The movement of Will’s jaw is difficult, like his joints are freezing over from the cold, ice locking them into place. Beverly shakes her head, grimacing as she unclips a salt and iron bomb from her belt and elbows the boy nearest her. She brushes roughly past Will and begins a careful descent down the ladder, facing forward all the while.

The doctor’s empty eyes are perfectly trained on her all the while. Will knows why she wants to keep moving, to keep the weight from clinging to her bones and weighing her down to a stand still, avoid being easy prey for whatever might be in the room.

She removes the chain-sash from her shoulder with care as Will ushers his fellows down the ladder first, never turning their back to Lecter. As she arranges the ponderous irons in a circle near the ladder’s base, Will can feel the less-than-good doctor twitch.

He doesn’t see it, but he can feel a faint itch on the outskirts of his mind, the urge to rise from his chair. The cold that flares, the suffrageof an unpleasant, albeit minor annoyance. Lecter somehow keep one eye on Beverly and one on each agent as they descend into the cold and the dark, marking them somehow for slaughter.

Beverly and her team remain resolutely inside the iron circle, spheres of salt and iron at their sides and rapiers raised. Hannibal Lecter has not moved. No aggression, no attempts to engage them, just little flare-ups of a sharp, wintry chill—

The screech of wheels and wood fills the room without warning as Will steps out onto the first rung of the ladder, meeting nothing but freezing air. He wobbles dangerously over the void beneath him, carpet and faintly shining hardwood.Will grips the balustrade like a lifeline and pulls himself up, overbalancing and tumbling back into the bookshelf.

The cold of the doctor’s mind, the itch, the rage straining against it’s bonds flares as Will’s head knocks against the shelf, sending a volume or two falling open on the floor with the muffled crack of an book spine that hasn’t been stretched in ages.

He looks down across the office to see Dr. Lecter’s face is turned upwards towards the mezzanine, to where Will is hunched against the bookcase. Will can feel him on high alert now, there will be no more playing of games. The cold on the edges of his brain is inching closer with every passing moment.

Beverly’s team raises their salt bombs. Slowly, cautiously, Will rises, his rapier ready in hand. Cautiously, Will shuffles towards the edge of the mezzanine, reaching down to push the ladder back into it’s proper place, all the while keeping Hannibal’s eyes on him. As soon as his fingers brush the freezing wood, he knows he’s made a costly mistake.

A wind, cold and harsh and nothing like what Abigail Hobbs had created, explodes throughout the room. Books thump against the back of the bookcases as they’re blown farther back. The doctor stands in one fluid motion, shoulders set back and posture rendering him almost larger than life.

A salt bomb flies high into the air, and plunges down to shatter at the doctor’s feet. Reinforced with iron shards, slivers of silver-grey and white spray across the carpet and chair. Dr. Lecter twitches as the salt and iron shards fly like shrapnel towards him, through him, and ectoplasm spits across the carpet, singeing holes through it.

The wind picks up sharply and Will falls the the floor, a sliver of pain cutting a bloody gash through his head. Books begin to fly from the shelves, one by one, then in groups, the heavy volumes scattering their looser pages.  The cold inside his mind and outside in the room intensifies tenfold as the wind picks up and he knows with a sickening certainty that they are in over their heads. The water has closed in over them and the oil is blocking out the sun. They’re going to drown.

The papers on the desk fly into the air and the weighty curtains flap, rising from their guard posts across the the window like Visitors from walls, reaching out for a cold, deadly embrace. _Maybe they_ _ are _ _._ Slowly, painfully, Abigail Hobbs slips from between the folds of the flapping curtain, or maybe she’s pulled  _ from  _ it. He can feel her reluctance, her  fear, but it’s draining away. Will can feel her consciousness slipping from her grasp, her will to resist fading.

She’s nearly as detailed as the doctor, floating through the lounger with a despondent air as she’s drawn to his side. He extends a hand to her, an offer that she accepts. Suddenly, Dr. Lecter’s shirt is a blinding white stained extensively with something Will hopes isn’t blood. His hair is disheveled, falling over his forehead and eyes. Only this isn’t quite Lecter. It looks like him, it acts like him, but the violence isn’t his. It’s wrong, it’s all so, so wrong. This isn’t Lecter. It can’t be. And still Abigail remains by this imposter’s side, face in shadow.

Wind roars throughout the room, but still the ghosts have done nothing to attack them, given them no outright reason to advance. They’ve only kept them at bay. They can’t fight back. You don’t fight back unless provoked, you don’t agitate a Visitor purposefully unless they haven’t manifested. So they are forced to watch as a grim spectacle is re-enacted before them. Pulling her back flush to his chest, whoever is in Lecter’s place brings a shining curve of white to Abigail’s throat and presses it deep into the once rosy skin of her neck.

  
The wind peaks.

All at once, Will’s mind is sent into a blinding free fall. He can’t think, he can’t move, can’t breathe for the searing pain. His mind is on fire, a billowing blaze licking at the trees of any coherent thought and scorching the ground in it’s wake. The landscape is unrecognizable, crumbling to ash and crashing down under it’s own weight.

He  knows  the fear, the pure, magnificent rage, and the feeling of drowning, the scalding red heat in his lungs. Will is so wrapped up in the house, the ghosts, the doctor and the girl, that he doesn’t know where he ends and they begin. He’s drowning, drowning, drowning and oil and blood are filling his lungs...

———————

 _ As the wind peaks again, one of the agents is nearly knocked off of her feet by the iron chain. All four of them jump out of the way as it slides across the floor, propelled by the force of the wind. None can see for the books and papers.  _ _ Another operative falls to the ground, her ears bleeding and face once screwed up in pain now expressionless. _

_ The eldest junior agent, a girl, makes a desperate grab for the ladder, but her wrist is grabbed by her senior. Beverly pulls her to the ground, away from the ladder that seems locked in its place on the floor. A flash in the darkness grabs their attention and someone grabs Beverly’s hand—her last operative. The remaining three duck and weave through whizzing books and flying papers, keeping as low to the ground as they can. _

_They shouldn’t provoke him, but things have gotten out of hand. Salt bombs soar through the air and smash on walls, far, far away from any place they might be of help. All three unhook their only canisters of Greek Fire from their belt and hurl them at the center of the whirlwind in a last-ditch attempt to quell the chaos. With an unholy shriek, the canisters burst in mid air, spraying fire, iron, salt and magnesium throughout the room. _

_ Papers, books and bookcases catch fire. The blaze grows rapidly, turning the twister of volumes and notes into a whirling, smoldering tornado, and fans the fires at the edges of the room. _

_ Through the haze of ectoplasm and other-light and a paper twister, the other boy, ears bleeding, strains against the wind and fire towards the storm’s eye, dangerously close to what seems to be a strange fusion of lost souls. Shadows are leaping up and out of the walls, adding their malice and chaos to the fray and screeching at the flames lick at their unholy bodies. _

_ A cold hand reaches out for the boy, inviting, welcoming, promising respite and warmth as he falls into it’s wintry grip. Beverly trips and falls over the unconscious body of the eldest operative, bleeding badly from a jagged line in her forehead. _

_ When she rises, she is met by the pale, blank face of a girl no older than nineteen, black hair and shining, empty eyes. Her face is marvelous and marble-like, white as death and smooth as glass, and she smiles in her bloodied nightgown, reaching out to Beverly, seemingly to pull her to her feet. _

_ Beverly’s ears are bleeding, she has nowhere left to go. Why not join her? _


	9. Curled in the Corner and Cold as Death (pt. 3)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise this is the last part of the chapter series. Sorry it’s short, I just wanted to get this done.

_ The structure is magnificent, a throne fit only for a god. Or Death himself. _

_ Maybe Greed. _

_ Gluttony. _

_ Pride. _

_ He who sits is neither and all. He who sits is swathed in red and black silk, bathed in watery light from the windows dappled by the offshoots of bone. He who sits has chosen the throne of antlers however impractical it may be. He who sits has five attendants at his feet. _

_ A young woman with hair dark as the new moon and a face pale as the full one. _

_Two boys no older than thirteen who’s eyes are cold and empty. They shiver. _

_ Another boy bundled in a warm navy blue coat and scuffed boots. _

_ And a girl of fifteen, with clever eyes and clever hands and clever thoughts not quite quick enough to escape. _

_ Will’s hands and arms are drenched in oil and blood. It looks black, all of it. He looks up into the face of the man on the throne and his crown of prongs. His lips do not move as he speaks but it rings throughout the room in a voice sweet and ponderous, feverish and hot like the scent of madness. A python springing upon it’s prey and coiling and curling ever so gently around it, talking the poor thing down until it clenches tight around the luckless animal and toothpick bones splinter. Will hears his voice vying for dominance amongst the crowding, clamoring echoes of children too young to die. _

**_ “I was expecting the Chesapeake Ripper... _ **

**_...Or are you he?” _ **

———————

The first thing Will feels is cold. No sight, no sound, only crawling, lifeless cold. It reaches deep into his bones. It’s hollow. His every joint feels sore and stiff. He is not dead, he knows he isn’t. He would know the swelling and burning chill of ghost-touch anywhere, and this isn’t it. Maybe it’s worse. Maybe it’s not. It’s a while before Will begins the process the sound around him. Footsteps, panicked hushed voices.

Sirens. Hands reach for him, lights make his eyelids glow a soft red-orange. The ground shifts under him again and again, he can’t move. Will doesn’t want to. 

_ The ride to the hospital is spent between consciousness and unconsciousness. _

The beeps and the whirs of machinery and the sharp blip of the heart rate monitor are the noises that wake him. Too many alarms, too many individual sounds that fade into the background hum of the hospital. It makes Will’s head hurt. Again.

The fire in his mind has been put out for the time being, the cold’s advances quelled. Will’s throat is dry. It itches like the buzz in the back of his mind, Dr. Lecter’s rage. He’s coughing violently. Will hunches over. The the blips the monitor emits are more sparsely spaced. There is a hand on his shoulder pushing him gently back down and a straw pressed to his lips. Gratefully, he sips the water offered. When Will opens his eyes, Jack is there looking careworn and wan. He does not smile. 

In the following hours, Will’s memories seep back into his brain like the drip on his IV. 

_ The room like a theater. _

_ The fractured statuette head. _

_ The doctor in his chair. _

_ The Hobbs girl. _

_ Metallic on his tongue. _

_ Rushing in his ears. _

There are things he does not remember, but he knows, like an old photograph twisted into a faded recollection in a child’s mind.

_ Fire. _

_ Magnesium. _

_ Iron and salt. _

_ Books. _

_ Ghostly hands reaching out. _

In the following hours Will is filled in, bit by bit, by his memories and the first responders who made it onto the scene. No sound had been heard from the front of the house, no one had given Jack any warning of what was to come besides the notice of a basement trapdoor.  They heard nothing from the Lecter house until a team on the second floor had left the house to report that any Visitor left had vanished. There were simply no psychic disturbances to be found within the walls.

Then a call had come in from a block or two away. Firefighters had been summoned to respond to disturbances and eventually a growing blaze spotted in a long-deserted building. Those who arrived on the scene quickly deduced that this was no ordinary blaze and sent out a distress signal to any vehicles from psychic investigation agencies in the area, calling for help.

At least an hour had lapsed before anyone responded. Before anyone had been able to pick up the signal.

Jack’s extra teams had then driven straight towards the sight of the blaze, but by then the damage was done. The office of Dr. Lecter was blown halfway to high heaven. Magnesium fires still smoldered gently in the corners and books and papers still flitted around the room, curling and crumbling slowly to ash. Sharp, slanting shadows were cast across the apocalypse-esque devastation as the early sun shone through the windows.

Five bodies were found.

One on the mezzanine, bearing cuts and bruises aplenty from the flying debris.

One, barely conscious, curled against a wall with a nasty gash across her forehead and a burn to match.

One near the set of chairs in the center of the room, face down, swollen, and blue. Ghost-touched.

One splayed on the floor and bleeding badly, blood crusting over on the carpet. She was wheeled away on a gurney.

And the last, a girl found loosely curled the corner between periwinkle couch and wall. Her hair had flecks of frost growing in it. Her face had turned blue, a last expression of faint surprise forever imposed on her swollen features.

Beverly Katz was wheeled away in a body bag while Will was strapped to a gurney and rushed out of the house in the early hours of the morning. 


	10. The Elk’s Head and The Loose Seal

_ She will be remembered not only in the halls of the FBPI, but in the minds and hearts of the people she worked with... _

Jack loses Will around there in his speech. It was some commemorative thing the for the families of the two agents who’d lost their lives in the Lecter house. Will just wants it to end. It’s a little selfish, but he hasn’t slept well in recent days.

He wants to go home to his dogs, to the comfort of the creak in the floorboards and the lights of his house in the distance at night when he bothers to turn and look back at them from afar. He wants the assurance of coffee or cocoa and the gentle rise and fall and whispers of a dog’s gentle sleepy breathing. He wants to grieve in peace. Alone.

Dogs can comfort Will better than any person ever could; they don’t try to talk, don’t try to tell you that ‘ _it’ll all be ok, eventually_ ’ they just sit with you and offer their silence and presence as a means of coping. They don’t crowd the air with unnecessary noises meant to be consoling words. They fill a certain emptiness and ease the ache of being too full. People cry.

It never helps watching other people crumble when you’re looking for a rock. Landslides don’t provide much stability and when Will’s moorings are built on sand at the moment, tides make everything worse.

And so he slips away. As Jack’s speech ends and everyone in the stuffy, sniffling room rises and chatter breaks out, Will vanishes through the crowd like a Gray Haze. People hardly notice as he brushes past; it’s a sort of talent he’s perfected over the years. No one turned as his slips out the door.

The hallways are empty. He decides the silence is better than the rumbling of a car engine and begins to wander aimlessly through the halls. Driving might give him a headache.  There is the occasional passing figure will make themselves known by the clicking of their shoes on the tiles and their fuzzy shadow and Will keeps his eyes focused on the floor in front of his feet when they do.

It’s actually quite loud, that sound. Too sharp. Uncomfortable when you’re-

_ H e l l o . _

Oh fuck. Will freezes mid-step, looking up sharply. The person passing him glances back. No one to speak except for the woman passing him and there was no way she said that, no way.  Oh fuck. He hears nothing more from the voice but Will gets the impression that  there’s no need for that language.  Turning a corner as sharply as he can, Will pauses to take his bearings. There is almost no one around. He’s by the staircase leading to the autopsy suites and the vaults lined with iron and silver and salt. 

_C l e v e r b o y . . ._

Again, the voice whispers into Will’s ear, somehow familiar, but he can’t quite put his finger on how or why. The tone and the timbre remind him of the time between dusk and dawn, the time of dreams. He tries to hold onto the sound, the inflection, the direction from which it came, but they slips like water through his fingers, like the memory is being forcibly pulled from his mind.

Will contemplates the double doors before him and decides to throw caution to the wind. Anyone could see him. Anyone. Any random person could pass by door and see a silhouette through the frosted glass, knowing full well that no one should be down there without permission and that somehow doesn’t stop Will from turning the handle and slipping in the same way he left behind the mourning crowd.

The hallways are too clean and the lights are too bright and the click of his shoes on the floor is too loud. He’ll surely be caught, but no one is here. No one except the cold corpses and the dried out, crumbling skeletons yet to be identified. Cases yet to be solved. The frosted glass is lined with silver and the autopsy tables are made of iron. He’s alone.

The suites pass him by and the psychic silence begins to press. Through another set of iron doors and the vaults appear before him. Iron carts with silver-glass sliding doors sit next to each door, keeping silver-glass jars and boxes and containers of Sources sealed up tight. Keeping the heart of a Visitor locked up. 

_ S o n i c e t o s e e y o u a g a i n . _

The voice is so close it makes Will’s ears ring. It’s a Visitor, it has to be, and a powerful one at that. _How is it speaking_ _ through  _ _the silver-glass?_ He searches frantically for the jar or box in which the Source might be held, scanning the carts waiting to be registered and sealed away.

Will skids to a halt by a vault door near the end of the hallway, one with an extra latch or two. They require a keypad to open and are watched from every angle by security cameras and oh god, Will could get fired if he makes one wrong move down here, but what the fuck. The cart’s catch on the silver-glass door isn’t locked properly, probably someone up late or early, wanting to get the job done before a drive home after a long night or a cup of coffee in the early morning hours.

Inside the cart is a large jar made of thick silver-glass with multiple engravings that warp the shifting colors of the ectoplasm beneath. It shines a strange pale gradient, fluctuating from almost white to baby blue to azure and cobalt the farther down you went. They ripple and shiver and shimmer. Inside, Will can make out the dark outline of an stag’s head, or an elk, judging by antler size. He recalls the fractured statuette in the doctor’s office.

The jar’s lid has multiple twisting knobs that unlock when aligned; he’s seen these types of silver-glass containment before. Usually reserved for more powerful Visitors. The weaker ones get latch-jars of silver, enough to keep them quiet or boxes with intricate interlocking latches on them. One of the knobs on the jar hasn’t been closed properly and a small grill in the jar’s lid is exposed.

_ H e l l o a g a i n , m o n g o o s e ! _

As if a acting on autopilot, Will slides the catch of the silver-glass wall and pushes it aside, immediately reaching for the jar. He unloads it from the cart and sets it on top.  _ Why is he doing this, why does he bother? _

_Curiosity is not a sin, but we should take care to exercise caution and control over our curiosity..._

The voice, now mostly unobstructed, has a strange accent to it, but the silver glass still gives it an odd sort of brogue as it speaks. It is sweet and ponderous, the voice of an anaconda, not quite heavy, but large and powerful. The man on the antler throne. The time between dusk and dawn, the time of dreams. The ectoplasm begins to swirl and contort and soon the shining, hollow face of Hannibal Lecter sits warped beneath the silver-glass.  _ Why this? Why now? Why me? _

The face only smiles. It is a chilly sort of look, one that doesn’t extend to the face’s empty eyes. It opens it’s mouth to speak and Will snaps out of it. What was he thinking?! Without hesitation, Will turns the knob in the lid of the jar and shoves it back amongst it's fellows, shutting the door and sliding the catch a little more violently than he'd intended. 

He can feel Lecter's silent presence as he enters the hallway of suites again.


	11. The King on the Chromium Throne

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot has been happening lately. I’m sorry for not getting this out sooner, but I’m dealing with some heavy stuff at the moment so updates might be a little farther apart.

Everyone in the house on that fateful night was given two weeks off. Everyone with Beverly that night who was still alive got three. Jack doesn’t bother Will on his weeks off. He’s glad for it.

The days don’t really blend, but he starts to loose track of where he is, when. When you’re alone, time starts to think it can get away with things, odd things. Will will stand in the stream, nestled in the quiet and the rush of cold and oxygen for hours upon hours, sometimes only minutes that feel like they’ve been worn down and stretched past their breaking point.

The line and hook and the rifle and cartridge. Did he stalk or lure in house that night? Which will it be today? 

The dogs are happy, albeit confused at his sudden prolonged stay, but all the same, they gather round his legs and gamble about the yard and gather again like a flock of birds. They have boundless energy to spend. Will can’t quite liken them to children because children loud. Noisy. But dogs, no, they’re noisy and clumsy at times, yes, but they know when to shut up.

They know, without words or hints when one of their pack has been laid low by something or other and they rush to the other’s side. It’s how they survive. Will likes that about them. He likes watching them streak through the grass as it shifts like the shadows do when you’ve been staring wide-eyed into the darkness for too long and then loop back around again. They’ll come back. They’ll always come back. 

But when Will settles down to sleep, there is little he can do to quell the dreams that aren’t quite nightmares, but still leave him sweaty and painfully alert.  _ The man on the throne of antlers. Sometimes he speaks, sometimes he stares, soft and curious, but still from high above. His crown of antlers extends towards the ceiling, empty branches of bone craving sunlight. The branches are empty of leaves. The ceiling is different this time, made of high, arching glass and on the floor is a skeleton, posed dynamically under the place where the glass dome joins. The glass shatters abruptly as the branches push towards open sky. _

Sometimes the moon-faced girl slips into his head again, alone on the steps of the throne. _ She brushes her hair, dark as the new moon, careful and slow, savoring her time. Her fingers are thin and graceful. She is bone china, and when she turns her full-moon face to him, her brush-hand slips onto her neck and blood begins to pour and there is something curved and sharp and shining white like the crescent moon in her hand instead of her brush pressed flush to her neck. _

Sometimes there are two in Will’s dream, children of thirteen or so. _ They huddle together, the boys. Frost sparkles like diamonds in their hair. Their fingers have gone blue, like they’ve died of some sort of freezing cold. They shiver. The children’s eyes are empty sockets. They don’t shine when the light touches them. Their clothes are stiff and a decade or two old. They make Will wonder. Why are they here? Why are they bound the the steps of the throne forevermore? _

Sometimes the boy from Beverly’s team pays him a visit.  _His hair is like a flame, red and wild. He was so pale in life that death makes little difference. He is still lanky and wiry and strong. His fingers are slowly fading into blue. He was quick on his feet and his Sight was impeccable and he could have run his own agency someday._

The dreams Will dislikes the most are the ones with Beverly.  _ She stares at him. She stares and stares and stares until Will notices the blood pouring from his clenched and sweaty fists. Buckets of it. It floods the room like a theater, black and shiny and she removes her shoes and socks. Beverly rises from her seat on the throne’s steps and dips her toes into the blood. A great plume of flame rises from the spot her foot touches and skitters across the surface of the liquid, lighting it until the room is blazing and Beverly is encased in flames. They’re cold, so, so cold.  _

These are the dreams Will wakes from in a sweat, his dogs whining, and a pricking feeling in his bones.

———————

Jack respects Will enough to let him use up his leave time before calling him back.

Dr. Lecter, he says, is behaving rather oddly.


	12. Boys in Navy Blue

Will vividly remembers the day he first heard Lecter speak properly as he’s lead down the stairs to the autopsy suites by an increasingly agitated Jack. Apparently, as the doctor’s ghost jar was being registered and filed away, one of the agents had unscrewed the knobs to check the make and model of the jar and the doctor had spoken, actually spoken. Scared the boy half to death.

Now, Type Ones are typically so weak that they can’t string more than a word or two together without perishing yet again on the spot and Type Twos, though stronger than Type Ones, can only repeat and remix a few sentences or phrases, occasionally changing them up just to have a little fun. But they don’t  speak . Not coherently at least.

Visitors don’t hold conversations with the living and those that do are practically myth at this point. Type Threes, they’ve been dubbed. Visitors so potent and conscious they can hold entire conversations with the living, not restricted to a set of influences or behaviors or traits.

The existence of Type Threes is a topic of controversy and is one of the most hotly debated subjects in psychic investigation circles, with any conversations held with them unrecorded or without substantial proof. But the agent filing away the rather wretched doctor had heard him speak, addressed the poor boy by name. Another boy and girl with him had corroborated his statement and Jack had then called Will with urgency that might have been ill-disguised panic.

People weave around them as they traipse down the hall, chatting in hushed voices under the buzz of conversation and the clicking and clattering of tools and silver and iron. Some are wearing visors with silver in them as a precaution, others flit about in groups, far enough away that it isn’t a risk. They’re in well-lit, highly-protected autopsy suites anyway, it’s unlikely any Visitor will make an appearance.

As he and Jack enter the vault hallway, the buzz in the back of Will’s brain grows stronger with each step. They pass the place Will found the ghost-jar, found the voice calling out from down below and turn down another hallway, again lined with doors. They come in pairs: two doors—not connected—side by side. One of each pair is keycard-protected, Will notices.

They’re examination rooms. Places where people can study Visitors from a safe distance and without the risk of death. The public would flip if they knew, Will is sure of it. They’d panic.

They're quite plain rooms, and very different from the interrogation rooms for the still-living. Those are larger and far more dismal than these. Eggshell walls and a table bolted to the floor just in case a poltergeist or some other manipulative entity works up enough nerve to try and get away with something, and an iron-reinforced silver-glass window on the far wall if they simply wish to examine a Visitor in a controlled environment.

On the table in this room sits a large, thick, silver-glass jar with many complicated little knobs on the iron lid. All are set securely in the locked position. The carvings and depressions and grooves on the glass warp the vibrant blue of the ectoplasm. The jar is fastened to the table by a series of locks and levers as an extra safety precaution. In that jar is the faint outline of an elk’s head.

Jack appears on the other side of the silver-glass window and silently directs a young man towards the correct buttons on what Will knows is a soundboard. A girl young enough to still posses talent has a set of headphones on and a laptop open. She gives Jack a nod, who in turn signals Will. 

With only slightly shaking hands, Will unscrews one of the knobs on the jar’s lid and is hit immediately by an onslaught of psychic disturbance. Though it’s the middle of the day, though the room is laced with iron, Dr. Lecter is still strong enough to speak. He is the voice in Will’s nightmares. _The man on the antler throne._

_ Hello. _

The swell of noise makes his ears ring a little as Will adjusts to the sudden noise. He recollects himself before speaking, recalling one by one the many times he’s done this with more talkative Visitors. They tend to be the ones with the worst stories. The words should come out flat and rehearsed, but Lecter’s voice cuts him off.

_ Please do not humor me, Will. If you intend to, first I must apologize for the fate of poor Miss Katz- _

“Don’t. Don’t humor  _ me _ .”  _ Don’t say that, not now.  _ Will can’t listen to that, not when both Lecter and Beverly are appearing in his dreams. He can feel the doctor’s slight irritation, but Will refuses to trust him. He’s not genuine, he’s a murderer.

_...Well. _

“Were you killed?” The question comes rehearsed; it’s standard for any ghost who displays a predilection for conversation. Will often wonders why, it’s not like most of them will give you a direct or coherent answer. They may drop clues, yes, but still. Lecter doesn’t speak, but this time Will can’t quite discern his answer. It’s not a yes or a no, sort of an  _ I’ll never tell _ with less humor than the phrase conveys. “Who was Abigail Hobbs?”

_...A daughter. Of sorts. _

“Why did you kill her?”

_ I keep my promises.  _

“...Who else have you killed?”

_ I am no different than the farmer taking his pigs to slaughter. Is that murder when those pigs will be put to good use? _

_ What the fuck? What the actual fuck?  _ As Will listens to the answers Dr. Lecter is giving and knows the click of the computer keys will be echoing away in the next room, he can’t help but panic. He’s talking to a Visitor. Holding a solid conversation. Visitors don’t  _ do  _ that. They can’t have found a genuine Type Three. It’s impossible, they’re practically nonexistent. Will’s never been one to take a side in the Type Three debates but now he can’t ignore what he’s hearing. He cracks. “ _ Why Beverly _ _?_ ” The doctor takes his time answering.

_ You and your friends arrived uninvited. Quite rude, don’t you think? _

Will isn’t taken aback. He isn’t shocked. He’s scared. The doctor’s words scare him, but not in the way Visitors do. They stalk and stare and gape, ungainly and unattractive. They are scary. But Dr. Lecter is unnerving. The simplicity of his words and the complexity of his intentions are all frightening on their own but his intentions are far more sinister. It’s a challenge.  _ Death will not stop me. Will you? _

_ And you were not the first. _

Those word break into Will’s thought processes and make his mind rattle and his ears ring.  _ The boys with blue fingers shivering by the antlered man’s feet. They sit upon the silks trailing from his body, huddling into themselves as best they can. They’ve been quite rude, letting themselves in like that. _

_ They didn’t receive an invitation to dinner and now there isn’t enough food to go around. _


	13. He Followed Me Out Of My Dreams

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> POSSIBLE TRIGGER WARNING: Passing mention of suicide, read at your own risk

“He’s killed before, Jack. That’s why the house was so full, we were right, _we were right_.” 

Will is pacing back and fourth across the floor of Jack’s office. He can’t think straight. He can’t think much at all. The floor shifts quietly under his feet and the tick of the clock on the wall is sharper than it should be and he just  can’t think,  oh god, his breathing it too loud. He can’t quite process the conversation of only the minutes prior, when he spoke to a Visitor and the Visitor  spoke back . Coherently. It was unheard of. Will has begun to feel like someone’s just beat his brains like eggs and dumped them into a frying pan.

“H—He killed them and—and he ate them. He ate them, and that’s why they gravitated towards him; it doesn’t matter where they died or how, but they became tied to him. A personal battalion. Strong enough to drive away anyone who might disturb him. Weak enough to influence. ”

_ Weak in comparison to Lecter,  _ Will’s fried brain says,  _they pale in comparison to a genuine Type Three._ Will’s watched a ghost, a pair of lungs with breath long-gone, sap the resistance from a Type Two, bend her to his will. He broke the Hobbs girl. Took away the last hope of relief she had, of freedom from damnation to this mortal coil. He’s spoken to death and death answered, and he does not like it, not one bit. Jack watches him as he paces back and forth and back again with an alarm that can’t be described as well-disguised.

“Will, you need to step back for a minute. Breathe. You need to calm down.”

“No, Jack. I can’t. I can’t because we’ve never seen this before, we’ve never dealt with this! Jack, this— _ this is a genuine Type Three!” _

Will’s voice peaks and cracks as his panic comes to a head. He watches Jack’s eyes widen as his carefully schooled expression cracks.

“Will, we don’t know that.”

“Yes, we do! There is no way you are going to tell me that Dr. Lecter qualifies as a Type Two-“

“Will. I understand your concerns. But my patience is waning. We don’t  know  what Dr. Lecter is, but we can’t say he’s a Type Three. We don’t know that yet.”

There is a danger not so sugar-coated in Jack’s tone that Will can’t possibly miss. It’s a warning, an  I respect you, but I also make the rules.  He knows when he’s beaten. Will stops his incessant pacing and tries to still whatever raging, half-formed theories may still be violently swirling like ice cubes in a vigorously stirred glass, only succeeding in part. The floor has ceased its relentless squirming and his breathing has quieted, but the clock’s relentless ticking is still scratching at Will’s skull like tapping fingernails. It echos. It bounces off of the bones in his head.

——————

Will knows he shouldn’t be here. He knows it’s dangerous and stupid and oh god, the security cameras, but he asked Jack this time. Jack can cover for him. Will knows he can. Will trusts him.

He hates the dim light of the autopsy suits as he passes them, the faint other-light emanating eerily from one or two room. The Visitors are repressed enough by the iron and silver, the water in the pipes running through the walls and the bunches of dried lavender burning in great stone braziers. The smell only soothes Will’s nerves so much. It brings back uncomfortable memories, ones that make him second-guess the shadows in the corners.

He has to do this now, he has to do this without anyone here, not even Jack. It feels wrong. Exploiting Jack’s power and Will’s influence. Their trust. But there are certain things Will just has to know. Curiosity may kill the cat, but the cat hasn’t yet joined the few bodies left out for the night because of late-working examination teams.

The vault doors pass Will one by one and the smell of lavender grows still stronger as the braziers in the hall become more closely interspersed. You hardly notice the damn things in the daytime, but at night their light casts dancing shadows along the walls. Will approaches the vault door behind which Dr. Lecter is held and swipes Jack’s keycard quickly, as though using up the last of his nerve before it leaves him for good.  There are many echoing clicks and clunks and then the door hisses open.

The room is psychically silent, what with all the iron and silver-silver glass. Medium-sized doors line the walls like the rooms in which the bodies and objects being actively studied reside, but these all have little cards attached to them. Names and aliases, date of birth and death if known, and type of ghost, all organized alphabetically. This vault carries exclusively Type Twos, the strongest of the FBPI’s collection. The one that give them the most trouble.

Will recognizes some of them, other are before his time, others are completely foreign. He recognizes the ‘Goatman’ as he was dubbed by the press: a rather troublesome and sadly unidentifiable Poltergeist who’d taken to dragging unwitting travelers off of the bridge.

Frankenstein’s Bride, an unlucky suicide who’s taken her own life after her husband-to-be had been killed and named for the rather grotesque manner in which she’d died. She then sought after his killers for years to come, but being bound to the house she’d perished in could do little to act against them. Will recalls clearly finding her wedding dress cold to the touch as he pulled it from the pile of dust that was all that remained of her bones. That night had been very long.

There, Dr. H. Lecter. Yanking open the drawer, Will pulls the jar from it watching the ectoplasm flare. Tucking the weight object under his arm, he scurries back to the door feeling the cold scratching at the door to his mind. 

When he finally reaches the interrogation room, Will is somehow too eager and too apprehensive to care about properly latching down the jar before he spins one of the knobs open and sees the grate come into view. He gives the sharp stab of cold no time to give itself voice. Will’s waited too long.

“Who were the two boys?”

_ Am I so boring to only be brought out when information is needed? _

“ _Who were the two boys?_ Why did they have to die?”

_ They were not invited to dinner. _

“Look, if you don’t just tell me what I need to know I’m going to put you back in your drawer and never open you again.” Will feels a stab of panic like an electric shock as he begins to twist the knob.

_ Very well. I am a little surprised, though. I thought you might already know. _

“I wouldn’t be asking you if I had.” Buried deep beneath the almost concerning speed of Will’s heartbeat and the adrenaline that’s almost replaced his blood by now, Will can feel Dr. Lecter’s disapproval. Not at Will for his ignorance, but more like a storyteller bitter about their tales being forgotten. As though it is an affront the the doctor himself. 

_ My house has not been left entirely undisturbed. There was a group a few decades ago who’d been so unwise as to enter my abode without permission. I believe they may have even worked for your organization. Along with them came a set of twin boys, both identical in every aspect, almost like a hive mind. Never separated in all their time in my house. _

_ They passed Abigail Hobbs and the others who she’d alerted to their presence. They found the trapdoor in my kitchen and the door in the cellar. They found the tunnel to my office. They entered, as you had. They did not leave. I gathered in my last years of life that the agency they worked for, however strongly funded by the government was still a fledgling and when they died in my supposedly empty house, I assumed their deaths were covered up. _

_  
_ _ Pity. They might have caught me sooner. _


	14. Escapee

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the delay, I’ve been suffering from a little bit of writer’s block.

Almost four weeks had passed since the events in Lecter’s office.

One week after, everyone injured in the incident had been released from the hospital. A handful of other operatives who’d broken off from their groups to form a search party had been assaulted as they caught wind of the chaos brewing in the office and had made their hasty way up the staircase when they were caught off guard by Poltergeist. One girl very nearly broke her neck, but she’d taken gymnastics classes in her youth said the doctor, and thank god for that or she would’ve died.

Two weeks after, the building and the doctor’s house had been swept at least three times by fifty different teams, all working together. They’d uncovered a menagerie of decomposing meat cuts and surgical tools and too many unpleasant things to name. They rotted and rusted. It hurts to touch them.

Three weeks after, both buildings were knocked down and the ground they stood on was heavily salted over. The remains of the office and house were sent to be incinerated in the Hestia Furnaces, where the Sources that have outlives their usefulness go to die. An odd sort of sacrifice to make, Will thinks, it’s done nothing to appease Hades, to stop him from keeping souls from entering.

In this case, the very building itself was too charged with psychic energy and was deemed a source and a safely hazard. Any possible individual sources had been removed for extensive testing. Will retells the events of his second break-in to Jack, at which point Jack has Will and a team of Extra-Sensitives examine the jar again. Dr. Lecter refuses to speak. It seems that Will and Will alone can galvanize the doctor into speech. Will hates and fears the jar and its occupant with passion but he also respect the Visitor, as anyone should. They do not tend to take kindly to rude behavior.

The atmosphere around the discovery of Lecter is less excited of fearful that Will anticipates. It’s more of a muted confusion. No one’s heard him speak aside Will and the poor frightened operative, but there are recordings corroborated by the agent taking dictation during the interview. No one quite knows what to think. And so they move on.

Until a Shining Boy escaped. Will had consulted on the case, but he hadn’t visited the field the Boy had been found in. Still, he was familiar with the Boy: quite young, but very bright for his age group, deemed observant and attentive by his teachers and reserved but friendly by his peers. His death was not one that had festered for too long—only a couple of years—before he began stalking the boggy, fogged area in which he’d died.

He’d been playing with a small group of friends who’d convinced him to join them, and initially it seemed that he was a strangely aggressive Type One. Not overly suspicious, Visitors are still quite a strange phenomenon. However, when it was found that he might have been murdered, he was upgraded to Type Two and identified as a Shining Boy: eerily beautiful and ill-tempered.

Now this boy hadn’t given anyone much trouble. His temperament was foul, yes, but his hostility remained overt, only confronting an agent should they intrude upon his personal space. He was quick-witted, quick thinker, even in death. Until he was pulled as a trial for a rather nervous Extra-Sensitive, a boy of nearly seventeen who’s gifts seemed to have prolonged their usefulness. The boy was supposed to ascertain how the Visitor had perished, but in a nervous slip-up had knocked the case containing the source to the floor.

Now, some silver-glass boxes are stronger than others, and this box in particular was moderately fragile; the box was on the larger side to house the clothes the boy had died in for his bones had already deteriorated enough that they couldn’t hold a soul. Thankfully, the box only cracked, but it was severe enough for the Shining Boy to escape. 

Will had, at Jack’s request, been interviewing Dr. Lecter more frequently than usual in the hopes of extracting more information on his killings. It was during one of these interviews that Will is interrupted by a muted psychic screech from what seemed like far away. As he shoves himself away from the table, Will pays little mind to the scrape of his chair against the floor, an altogether unpleasant sound he tries to blockout whenever he hears it.

Dr. Lecter’s jar is still open. The doctor goes frighteningly silent as Will listens closely for another disturbance. A physical crash rings through the air this time and Will bolts to the door, the ghost-jar leaving his mind entirely. As he wrenches the door open, he’s hit by another muted wail emanating from another one of the Visitor rooms. Somewhere, an alarm is going off. The door of said room has been thrown wide open, and a haze stands in the doorway, just visible in the daylight. He is radiant and beautiful in a lazy, frail sort of way, fuzzy and faint as though frightened.

But Will knows better, he can feel as much. The Shining Boy is irritated and thus enraged past the point of coaxing him back into his box. Someone would have to eliminate his apparition to safely deal with him. Anyone moving in the hallway freezes as the haze stands over the boy, flickering in and out of sight but stubbornly holding form. Will knows the Visitor’s been worn thin, too thin to be considered safe any longer. Without pause for thought Will’s hand is at the hilt of his rapier (he’d taken to carrying it around out of habit) and the sharp sound of metal whipping through the air echos down the hallway.

Any passing agent with enough sense has drawn their swords. The Shining Boy wavers and screams again, making Will flinch at the sudden spike in noise. He takes a defensive swipe at the Visitor, keeping the thing at bay while placing something between him and death, and just as he takes a step, the Shining Boy fizzles out. The hallway is plunged into perfect silent and the alarm flicks off. No psychic disturbances at all, not even the quiet, keening buzz of a room without sound. Too quiet. Will stumbles back to the room from which he came to see the ectoplasm in Dr. Lecter’s jar flaring bright blue. 

_ Now I hope we may continue without distraction. My apologies, where we we when we left off? _

Will stares at the jar, willing himself to turn the knob and shut him up, but he can’t. He looks at Jack through the glass, and Jack looks back at him from the doorway, clearly just coming back from observing the mess in the hallway. He turns from Will to the operative taking dictation. The kid has gone paper white and looks like he’d faint if it were’t for the chair.

———————

Not two days later, the doctor relayed the exact details of the Shining Boy’s story to Will, including the identity of his killer (one of the larger and more temperamental kids, it had been an accident. The boys had been teasing each other and it got quite physical when one of them snapped suddenly) in frightening detail. No one had informed Lecter of these events. When he was asked how he knew he said only this:

_I knew Abigail Hobbs in an identical way. Strange to know someone only from a post-mortem perspective._


	15. Cold Eyes and Changers

The fear in Jack’s department seems to have peaked overnight. Will’s mixed resentment and respect of the jar has been consistent, but he is significantly rattled one morning to arrive at his lecture hall, fully prepared for one of his (mercifully) less viscerally disturbing lectures to see not one Sensitive there and Jack waiting for him at his desk looking grim. Will holds back a sigh with difficulty, refusing to inquire as to the fate of his class. This isn’t the first time he’s encountered this setting.

“ ‘Morning, Will. Lecter spoke again.” Jack’s bluntness shakes Will from his morning stupor. No way.  _ No way that was true _ _._ Jack must’ve read Will’s thoughts on his face because he gets up and brushes past Will, motioning for him to follow out of the lecture hall.

”He scared the living daylights out of a senior operative and his entire team and sent an especially sensitive Listener into shock, Will.” Jack’s matter-of-fact tone pulls tighter the knot in Will’s gut with every step. He pulls Will into an empty hallway, “If I’m honest, we don’t have an official classification for what he is. I need you to find that out for me.”

Will knows what Jack is asking of him. Stories of alleged Type Three encounters or conversations have been bandied about for years, but no really solid proof of their existence has ever been found. Will knows Jack won’t believe it until it smacks him in the face. He’s make assumptions and guesses and infer a thing or two, but until all the boxes have been checked there will be no conclusive yes.

“No, Jack. I can’t.”  _ That is a lie. That is a lie and Will knows it. _ Jack seems to know it too because he doesn’t back down, only lowers his voice.

“I’ve seen you talk down a _Poltergeist_ , Will.”

“It’s not the same.”

“What’s the difference?”

“That poltergeist was restricted to a set of impulses and actions, it could barely speak intelligible English. Lecter is-“

“Coherent. Easier to persuade-“

“ _Intelligent_ , Jack,  Lecter is intelligent. That is _not_ normal and we haven’t seen that before, _I_ haven’t dealt with that before.  If you won’t take that into account-“  Will cuts himself short as a group of young Sensitives pass them by, probably touring the building and considering an employment opportunity. He’s ranting, he needs to calm the hurricane gathering speedup in his chest before it reaches land. Jack gives him a look telling him he crossed a line.

“Fear makes you reckless, Will. Everyone is scared of him right now, which is why I’m gonna have to ask you not to be. Are you scared of him?”

Will pauses, weighing honesty over the sudden desire to get himself a coffee he doesn’t need. “Are you scared of him?”

“No...No.” And with that, Will slips past Jack and forces himself to takes longer strides than strictly necessary on his way to the break room.

Will contemplates the contents of his paper cup with something that’s not quite rage. It’s the sort of rancid, rampant feeling anticipation, the strange precursor to full-blown  fear.  The acrid scent of smoke before the fire comes into view over treetops and hillsides set black against the cloudy sky.

There are many things housed within this building’s walls that anyone with two brain cells to rub together would fear, and rightly. Dr. Lecter makes them look like small potatoes. Now, there are stories aplenty of Type Three encounters or conversations, but many of them are just get-rich-quick schemes or trolls and attention hogs. It’s hard to know what’s real.

But this is authentic, and far more frightening than anything that might follow him out of reality and into his nightmares. It’s not healthy, not right to speak to Visitors like this. People have died. Been deemed insane. Both, in some instances. It’s why some reported Type Threes seem more believable than others, because the person in possession of them was driven to the edge by the wheedling and malevolence of the spirit. It breaks people. But who’s to say Will doesn’t already have a crack or two running through him?

When Will is briefed, he can tell within seconds Jack is reluctant to take any of the thing’s he’s saying as fact. Their research team has done everything they can, gathered from every source they can find, scoured any lead online or in person. They’ve compiled a list of commonalities and  consistencies throughout the reports and drawn up a list of traits to check off. Half of the check boxes are already filled.

If Dr. Lecter turns out to be a Type Three—a fact Will doubts at this point is untrue—they have to go public with it. Everything up until this point has been kept tightly under wraps, but if it’s proved Type Threes exist they could be a danger to the public. Will juggles these facts and possibilities as he digests the questions and procedures he’ll ask and perform, but little of it matters. He know’s he’s right. He  _sees_.

He saw in the house. He saw in the empty eyes of the Hobbs girl and the set of twins with frost in their hair. He saw in the fearful, far-off gazed of the children who lost their lives the the Lecter house that night. _Children, they were children._ He saw in the monster’s eyes when the Hobbs girl died. Somehow that look was different than the face of the doctor, but Will still isn’t sure why.

He can _see,_ but the blind spot calls desperately too him like the voiced in the house once did.


	16. Lavender

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BSHPTT — Baltimore State Hospital for Psychic Trauma and Treatment

Everything is on high alert. Neurons fire and fizzle out. Will’s hands are shaking and sweating and he’s lost all strength in his fingers. His nerves are frying themselves.  _ Just ask the damn questions.  _ The walk feels uncomfortably—no, unreasonably long.

He doesn’t want to chicken out. He knows he really shouldn’t but it’s better if he does and so as they reach to door to the interrogation room Will stops. “Jack. I can’t. I can’t keep looking at this, you know what it does.”  _Someday I’ll die here_ ,  is what Will wants to say, _in that very room. Someday,_ _ I’ll go insane. Someday when we go the the BSHPTT for an interview for a case you’ll be talking to me behind bars. Or handcuffed to a table.  _

“ No one else  can  look, Will-“

“Because they shouldn’t, Jack, _because they shouldn’t_!”

  
The look Jack gives him isn’t angry. There is no rage in his face. It’s also not _quite_ disappointment, but it’s close. Something more along the lines of regret and resentment left to fester and grow. Will wants to believe that it hurts Jack as much as it does him but it doesn’t, _it just doesn’t_. The nightmares that cling to you after witnessing rotting, shrunken corpses with their skin plastered to their bones are far different from the ones you get from Talent overload.

They’re so much more vivid and disturbing and strange; a life once lived playing back endlessly in an empty theater with not one to call if help is needed. You’re subjected to the same fate each time without fail. Nothing changes and the shadows playing on the walls and the fuzzy, dark shapes that swim across your vision do nothing to help. Will’s lungs hurt, he’s breathing too hard and he can feel a headache begin to bloom in his temples. He’s becoming hyper-aware of the staring senior operatives and the averted gazes of passers by.

_ Don’t let the hurricane reach shore, they feed off of it, Visitors will feed off of your anxiety and stress and you’re already wound up tight enough to break and- _ “I’m not going to tell you what you should do, Will.”

“Well it feel like that’s exactly what you’re doing.” 

Will resists the urge to knock into Jack as he passes him by and steps into the room.  _ Ask the questions, ask the questions and you’re done.  _ Oh, but he won’t. He’ll never be done unless his Talent fades or that damned Visitor shuts up or he’s driven out of his mind one day or he dies. Will can’t quite process where his feet are taking him but he knows he’s moving, he’s stopping, he’s sitting down.

They haven’t opened the jar yet. Fuck. He’s gonna have to do it himself. Painstakingly, Will pinches the knob between two fingers and twists it to one side so that the chink cut into it aligns with an opening in the jar’s lid, exposing only a small grill. Two pinpricks of cold glittering light spin into life inside the jar, warped by the silver glass. They spin, galvanizing the ectoplasm into life. Will refuses to look at Jack through the silver glass panel as the psychic silence is broken. The keening background buzz is muted by the only sort-of silence that fills the room when someone else is there.

_ Hello, Will.  _

Will’s hatred of the jar and the Visitor coiled and curling within the depths intensifies tenfold. Through gritted teeth and blinding fear, he reads off of the page in front of him. “Please state your full name for the record, Doctor.” Immediately, Will can feel the irritation, _the_ _oh dear, this? I’d hoped I wouldn’t have had to suffer this injustice_ ,  but Lecter does as he is told.

_ My name is Dr. Hannibal Lecter. _

“Can you say the names of the people in the next room?” Will fights to quell the shake and swell in his voice.

_ Jack Crawford and Aaron Murphy-Cobb. _

And then a switch is flicked, and suddenly his words echo as if from far away, as if he’s speaking on some sort of different frequency only Will is tuned to.

_ Y o u d o n ‘ t m u c h e n j o y t h e s e d i s c u s s i o n s . . . _

It catches him off guard, the lazy sort of spaced-out tone. 

_ A n d y e t y o u c h o o s e t o s a c r i f i c e y o u r s a n i t y f o r t h e m . _

_I’m not sacrificing anything_ ,  Will reminds himself—more to himself than the doctor—falsely, he might add, before opening his mouth to continue. Internally, he’s panicking. Lecter knows Murphy-Cobb can’t hear him, or Will for that matter and then-

_ I f I m a y a m e n d m y s t a t e m e n t , m a n i p u l a t e d s e e m s t o b e a m o r e a p p r o p r i a t e t e r m . _

Lecter can hear him.  Lecter can hear his thoughts. Fuck, fuck, fuck, he- again, Will feels as though someone senior to him is chiding him for his slip of the tongue but the sensation is foreign, distant and disconnected. But he’s been able to sense Lecter’s every epiphany, ever spike or dip in his mood, every inclination, so why is it such a shock that the connection works two ways? Is Lecter right?

_ M y a p o l o g i e s i f I ‘ v e s t r u c k a n e r v e . _

_ Since when is there such a thing as a polite Visitor?  _

_ N o ta l l o f u s a r e q u i t e a s b r u t i s h a n d i m p e t u o u s a s w e a r e m a d e o u t t o b e . _

_Sorry_.  Why is he apologizing, this  thing  has killed, is a killer, has taken so many innocent lives for his own gain, his own amusement. He shouldn’t be listening, he shouldn’t be here, be talking to this thing, he’s going to lose his mind if he hasn’t already misplaced the damn thing under the rotting floorboards of ancient, infested, festering houses or wrapped tightly in the wispy tendrils of ectoplasm that feel blindly across the floor when someone disturbs a Visitor’s headspace. Their plane of existence.

But he’s rambling. And Lecter is growing more irritated by the minute and the frost is materializing across  _ his  _ headspace again and he hates the cold, the prying, clawing freeze-over. Will wants more than ever to close the knob and wrap himself in the buzzing background. But he can’t.

_ Y e s , y o u c a n , b u t y o u w o n ‘ t . W h y ? _

“Will.” Jack’s voice echoes shakily through the speakers. Jack knows. He’s been scared shitless.  Finish the questions. And he does. Will speeds through them like they’re rehearsed lines, like he’s acting because he is. He couldn’t care less, he just wants to leave, leave and get back to the lavender smoldering gently in the braziers and defusing into the rooms and hallways.

The smell, unlike the tang of salt and the shine and scrape of silver and iron, is comforting. When he burns lavender before he sleeps, the nightmares feel farther away. They aren’t as severe. Sometimes he sleeps well. Sometimes, on the off-chance he sleeps well, Will has good dreams. 


	17. Mental Breakdown! In The Hallway

The very instant he steps out of the room, panic begins to wreak havoc in Will’s mind. He’s racing around the edges of his own head the G-force rendering him close to passing out. It’s over, the interview is over, so why is the fear still clawing at his heart and lungs, begging for the little breath he has to spare?

He can’t think, can’t see for the panic and the sweat and the strange, naked indecency of it.  It’s invasive. Lecter is invasive. A parasite, an infection setting his mind ablaze. Will slides down the wall and curls up, panting and panicking and trying to quell the fleeting, fading voices on the other side of the door. Jack exits the viewing room only a few minutes after, calls desperately for a medic and ushers traffic away from Will who’s uncurled from his position. He’s leaning against the wall with his head tilted back looking sickly and drained.

Jack looks like he’s seen a ghost. 

———————

_ He’s reached the end of the list, he’d done, he can leave. But Will can’t get up. Curiosity may yet kill the cat but it has to catch up first. He fights to still his frantic heartbeat before speaking. “The Shining Boy.” It’s not even a question. _

**_ Yes. I wondered.  _ **

_ He speaks so that Murphy-Cobb will hear him.  _

**_ The weaker varieties of Visitors are far easier to manage, no? You talk them down slowly, you test their outer defenses and soon enough they come crashing down around you... _ **

_ Like with the Hobbs girl, Will recalls. That fateful night as the poor girl bound to the house, to the vile entity coiling within the depths of the jar before him fought for her own identity, some faded recollection of why she remained- _

**_ A n d t h e n t h e i n n e rw a l l s f a l l i n . _ **

———————

There’s a medical wing in the FBPI. Will’s been there before. It always seemed to stick out, just a little bit. A ward for healing when half the building’s occupants are dead. However, the work they do requires it. Agents come back from assignments looking like they’ve been to hell and back and feeling twice as horrid; it’s borderline unsafe to not have a medical wing. But still.

Will has a psych eval and they give him something or other—he’s not really paying attention—to calm the coiling, undulating beast that just twitched awake in Will’s head, then curled back into itself and fell asleep again. Will barely notices. It’s happened before.

He has good days and bad days. On good days, he’ll flick open a lever on a ghost jar or slide the catch on a silver-glass case and see what hand Death had dealt him. He’s finish the game and pour himself a cup of coffee and maybe take a break before a lecture if he had one scheduled. Maybe wander a bit. On the bad days, he winds up here.

Jack sits in the corner through it all looking pensive and pained. He dismisses the medical team as soon as he can within reason. Will hazards a guess he’s going to get his head bitten off, but he’s proven wrong. “We’re not bringing Lecter out again.” 

“...”

“You just collapsed on me. I can’t have that. I can’t do that.”

“I’m okay, Jack, I just got a little lost is all.”

“That’s what you call a little lost? Will, you nearly collapsed. You’ve never passed out on me before.”

It’s true. Will hates it. He hates that Jack is right and he hates that he might or might not have been starting to enjoy talking to Lecter. He can’t like that. 

“This is on me.”

“I agreed to talk to him-“

“And I asked you in the first place.” Jack’s voice peaks as he rises from his chair. “I could’t bring myself to look past the proof that I had and I made a misguided decision.”

Again, he’s right. What he says next catches Will off-guard. One of the reasons he hates grief.

“I bent the rules letting Katz and her team go though that basement tunnel alone and I’m bending the rules letting you talk to Lecter over and over again. I’m not going to lose you, Will.”

He hates with passion the unexpected moments when someone’s name is brought up or when something so suddenly jumps out at you that forcibly reminds you of them. When you begin ponder their lack of existence without preparation. It’s when Will can’t quite keep his emotions in check. When the divide between his head and his heart, more specifically, his Talent and the emotions that come with it begin to blur and merge. It makes if more and more difficult to let go.

“Do you want to quit?”

He can’t quit, he can’t. Words Jack has said to him over and over again as a gentle half-joking prod play back to him like a Visitor’s reenactment of their death:  _ It’s your fault you’re the best, pal. _

He is the best, he’s saved lives before. He’d talked down a Poltergeist while a team of operatives rushed to the aid of one of their fellows. He’d survived multiple clusters during active duty. He can’t keep doing it, but he’s learning, he’s making progress, he can’t stop. Will can’t bring himself to. There is a certain quality about the peculiar intelligence Lecter embodies that, despite every red flag and warning sign, is intriguing.

He is intelligent. He’s unlike anything properly seen or studied by any agency. He’s dangerous.

“I can’t.”

“I said, do you  _ want _ to quit, Will? I can’t let you go back out there without consent.”

“I can’t go back out there, but I have to. We’re making headway.”

“Will, you are not leaving this room until I get a yes or a no.”

“My moorings just slipped a little. I just need some time. Get them out of the sand.” Will slides off of the examination table and test his balance before hobbling out of the room, off balance and unsettled. He needs another coffee. Or a nap. Maybe not a nap. The nightmares might get worse. Jack catches Will by the shoulder as he exits the room, irritable, panicky and drained.

“I’m here to make sure you don’t slip, Will. Hold on for me.”


	18. Shut Up

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, I’d like to say sorry about recent delays. Things have been pretty busy for me lately and on top of that I’ve been suffering from a lot of writer’s block.

Jack forces Will to take the rest of the week off without accepting challenge or protest. Will knows better than to fight; not now, no after his incident. He tries to enjoy his time off, he really does. He fishes, he spends hours at a time in the evening running through the empty field until the moon peaks over the tree line.

He picks up another stray on his way home after Jack puts him on leave. She’s not small, but she’s not large either and impossibly fluffy; given that combination, probably a puppy as well. Muddy too; the poor thing must have been out here for a few days at least, Will thinks. She looks like she’s been very well-taken care of, but lost weight quite quickly. She’s shy around him when he stops, wolfing down the doggy treat he offers and then backing away into the shadows as Will calls to her. But this takes time. It did with Winston. Eventually, he lures her into the back seat. After forcibly bathing her, it’s nearly midnight. Her name is Charlie.

Nights are strange, though, amongst the peace of the day. Will sleeps for once. No night terrors keeping watch like horrific guardian angels stripped of their divinity, no unsettling echos of his day melting into his sleeping hours. It disturbs him far more than his dreams.

———————

When he returns from leave, Will is informed of more unsettling—but not wholly unexpected—developments. Jack, grim-faced and apprehensive, talks in ill-disguised, nervously clipped tones through the events of Will’s time away. More tests had been run on the jar that had captured the attention entire research department of the FBPI and had somehow already become the stuff of legend amongst the younger agents within only a few days. These rumors had been quickly quashed, but there was still the occasional tense whisper between any group of operatives when adults or supervisors weren’t present.

Then a final test run only the day before proved grimly satisfactory. A theory proposed by the behavioral sector of the research branch was proven by the senior operatives who were to be engaging Lecter’s visitation during the test, (deemed upon classification as a Type Three to be volatile and dangerous, which, to be fare in Will’s mind, was not entirely untrue) armed to the teeth due to the newest safety regulations concerning the doctor.

They’d released a somewhat feeble Type Two into the room with Lecter, who’s jar had been opened slightly, and were there to supervise the behavior. The unnamed Visitor in question was known to produce a rather substantial apparition, and did so, but the instant it became disquieted by the presence of the living and another Visitor in the room, it seemed to panic. It loosed a howling cry and rushed Lecter’s jar, falling to uneven pieces of plasm (like it had been chopped up in mid air, the operatives said) and vanishing. 

This, apparently proved yet another dangerous point. Visitors faced with a territorial dispute can sap the other’s power if one is stronger than the other. Lecter, it seemed, could take it a step further, dismantling the manifestation entirely while utilizing a strange pseudo-Touch and deciphering the Visitor’s intent. At this, the entire department had been thrown into a frenzy and all mentions of the project outside of the building were prohibited. Even the youngest operatives kept quiet about anything they’d heard.

Will processes each bit of information he receives as it comes to him, wave after wave of progressively more unsettling discoveries. The indecent feeling, the unease and the violation comes back. How much does Lecter know of  him ?

———————

Days pass by. At Jack’s very hesitant request, Will enters another session with Dr. Lecter. (Although smalltalk is an area of skill that Will is frighteningly underdeveloped in.) He attempts to keep it aimless, finding from his previous experiences that the less general and more open-ended the conversation, the easier it is to avoid nightmares.

However hard he tries though, Will finds himself questioning how little he knows about the doctor himself. He can understand his malevolence, his dignity, his pride; they seem tangled like fine dew-dotted cobwebs with his own fragile emotions, but his history is something Will can’t seem to grasp. Hannibal Lecter is remarkably good at changing the subject, he finds. Will also finds himself contemplating the doctor’s existence, personality and history outside of the interrogation rooms, a dangerous practice.

He has to let go of any previous interaction, purge it from his memory. But he can’t quite seem to work out how. Like stubborn ivy, the echo of a life long-lost remains adhered to the walls of his mind. Not quite an annoyance, but some mildly unpleasant reminder of an unfinished job.

The day Lecter leaves his mind entirely (if only for a moment), is the day Jack approaches him during a break, one Will has elected to spend wandering aimlessly through one of the main hallways. It’s his favorite by far, on the smaller side and not as busy as the larger thoroughfares, plus is has little stylized planters full to bursting with flowers that connect to the ends of benches.

Jack looks harassed as he approaches Will, but that’s typical. Jack only calls on his expertises for the bad ones. He speaks in a low voice, despite the lack of people. “We have a new case on our hands, and I’d like you to help with it. It’s difficult to explain so I’ll cut to the chase. The case won’t be too hard; the demanding part will be Dr. Lecter.” Jack has the expression on a man who has nothing to say and nowhere to go and still tries to cling to his dignity. It’s terrifying. 

”You want to bring him-Jack, that’s-“

“I want to see if we can use him to our advantage.” 

Will teeters in the edge of saying no. He can’t do this. He can’t. It’s extraordinarily unethical, unsafe, insane to place an entity with Dr. Lecter’s power in an unpredictable environment. It’s mad. But he keeps his mouth shut.

”I’m here to keep you stable, Will. If you don’t want to, then say so.”   
  


He keeps his mouth shut.


	19. The Strangely Tangy Scent of Chlorine and Fresh Death (pt.1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The next few chapters will be inspired by an absolutely breathtaking short film called ‘Quand J’ai Remplacé Camille’ (‘When I Replaced Camille’, I think, I’m still working out the French titles). It gives me the creeps while still being incredibly beautiful and the message of the dangers of pushing yourself past your limits is very well-portrayed. The expressions and fluidity especially are what make me love this work of art. As well as the animation, the sound design and music are impeccable and it reminds me of Coraline’s soundtrack in a way; the off-kilter, high, almost child-like vocals that set you on edge just enough. I could honestly write an essay on the intricacies of this film.
> 
> In short, the project is part of a yearly series of short films made by the students of Gobelins, L’École de L’Image, an arts school in Paris, France. Their work is stunning (a few personal favorites of mine are Myosis-2013, Ramen-2019, and Monstera Deliciosa-2009) and I would recommend looking at more of it. Here’s a link to the video (apologies if if doesn’t work, if not, just look up the title):
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OZ-b0LYxLs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNIG: Detailed description of suicide. Be warned.
> 
> Aside from that, I just want to say that I’m sorry about my hectic updating schedule. This is my first time writing something like this and actually sharing it and updating it, and my schedule for August is unpredictable. Thanks for bearing with me through all of this though. You guys have made me so happy knowing people enjoy my work. Tried to get this one out quickly and am pretty satisfied with it. I’ll try to update more regularly.

When Jack explains it in further detail, the case really does seem simple compared to the logistics of dealing with Lecter. Though they’d hypothesized the Visitor they were dealing with was a probable Type Two based off of hysterical accounts from witnesses, the real challenge would not be dealing with the Visitor; the difficulty would be getting the ghost-jar into the building.

The environment was everything but fit for a Type Three of all things. A case location could turn into a crime scene at the drop of a hat; they were especially unpredictable environments and unsafe if not handled correctly. They’d researched the location’s history, they’d briefed a team of agents and still, Will does not speak up.

He’s going to get them killed, he thinks. 

———————

Will has always had a mixed relationship with pools, moreover the smell of chlorine in particular. Aside the assault on his senses that the chemical element to the scent brings about, he finds the tangy, sharp, almost dry notes contrast well with the heavy, cleansing moisture in the air. Like extreme cold or heat, it clears his nose and to some degree his head, but on occasion will give him splitting headaches. Mixed relationship.

Tonight, Will is lucky. No headaches, only the discomforting silence of a psychic presence. A team of operatives have already spread across the lobby of the pool taking readings at the twin rounded reception desks on either side of the double doors that lead to the pool. The white walls look grey in the darkness and the bright wave patterns in blue are dull.

They investigate the hallways branching off of the main lobby, but don’t go further than the doors at the very ends. Those pools aren’t what they’re inspecting tonight. They set up lamps, flashlights, and candles all clustered together on one of the desks and Jack, who’d shut down any complaints to his presence on the assignment and insisted that he supervise instead of the normal candidate retrieves a manila folder from his jacket and flips it open, going over the briefing before they begin.

Will puffs put his cheeks and slides his backpack off, carefully unzipping it and discreetly slipping his jacket out as he twists closed the only open knob on Dr. Lecter’s jar. He’d opened it with much trepidation earlier, at which point the doctor had given him the strong impression that he resented his talents being used in such a manner. He’d stayed silent for the entire ride.

The pressing silence closing in around Will’s head like a vise releases and immediately his shoulders relax. Zipping up his jacket, Will slides the backpack on, relishing the release of psychic pressure. He listens.

Will doubts that he’ll hear anything. The Visitor didn’t manifest in the lobby, according to the hysterical accounts of the girls who’d seen it. They were right to be panicked; a wan-looking young girl had burst into tears recounting her story. One of her best friends had died, you see. The group were members of the resident all-girls swim team, and had been on top streaks.

They’d placed first in their last meet and were set to move up on the tournament bracket for middle schools in their area; they’d celebrated with a team dinner. They were collectively ecstatic.

And the unthinkable happened. They’d had a late practice and Charlotte had stayed behind, they’d said. She said she’d needed to call her mother about something, they’d said. Leah, the weeping girl and Charlotte’s best friend had warned her about nightfall, but she’d brushed Leah off, reassuring her she’d call an Uber. She said she’d be fine, they’d said.

She was found by the poor receptionist as he unlocked the double doors the next day.

But this incident was at least a few months ago now. The toxicology report strongly backed up the theory of suicide, as extraordinarily high levels of melatonin were found in her system. There was an empty pill bottle in her jacket pocket and water in her lungs.

The owner of the pool had taken precautions against the girl’s spirit possibly returning after she’d been found drowned. Lavender was burned and silver and iron charms were hung around the pool. The water wasn’t moving, and therefore did little to suppress the spirit, but despite every precaution taken the area was locked down for two weeks post-incident.

They removed the charms and defenses gradually, and nothing seemed to come of it. Her parents had held a strict catholic funeral for her and a picture of her and her team was put up in the lobby trophy case along with a wreath of white roses.

A girl had committed suicide and that, it seemed, was the end of a rather sad story.

But oh, was it far from over.

Will took Leah to be rather fragile when first he heard her speak of her experiences. Not (emotionally) overly-sensitive per se, but more like a rather strong young girl who’s world had crumbled beneath her feet. She’d been staying late during practice as of recently according to a wiry girl named Hannah, working herself to the bone in a attempt to distract from the grief.

Privately, she said she worried for Leah’s health. The poor girl had been especially melancholy one particular night and hadn’t done well during practice. She’d bid her friends goodbye, saying she’d follow them out in a bit, but wanted to get a few more laps in. Hannah’s consciousness got the better of her and fearing the worst for her teammate, she held back. Leah and Charlotte had been the best of friends after all.

A scream had echoed from inside the pool and Hannah had barreled through the doors to see Leah huddled on the tiles of the pool deck, hyperventilating and incoherent with fear. The cold had hit her then.

Being only fourteen, both girls had a decent chance at developing psychic talent as all children do. Most end up doing so to a certain degree, and those that hone their Talent join agencies to help rid the world of whatever might be trying to crawl back from the other side.

In this case, wet and cold and terrified out of her wits, Leah had witnessed a figure floating in the water parallel to her along the bottom of the pool as she’d been powering through her laps. She was swimming in Charlotte’s usual lane.

It was somehow radiant without actually glowing, eerily beautiful and disturbing, dressed in a sweatshirt and gym shorts. It had no shoes. It barely grazed the bottom of the bottom of the pool as it had somehow kept pace with Leah as she’d swam without moving a muscle. The figure had looked up at her, somehow through her Leah had said, pleading with her lifeless eyes for something.

  
As soon as she’d scrambled from the pool, splashing water over the side and screaming bloody murder, the ghost-girl had gone. Hannah had barged into the room and barely reached Leah before perceiving the bitter, unnatural cold and dragging her and her friend away and out. 

On other evenings, locker room lights had flickered on and off at random intervals and a select few had heard weeping coming from somewhere near the pool’s edge. The pool had then called up the FBPI to try to schedule an investigation as soon as they’d gotten the call from Leah’s father, as at this point they were out of their depth.

Tonight, Will can feel the cold creeping along the other side of the double doors as it recedes from his mind. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ‘Out of their depth’ pun was intended by the way >:)


	20. The Strangely Tangy Scent of Chlorine and Fresh Death (pt.2)

Will is thankful for the door acting as a barrier between him and the room ahead; he’s not quite ready to face the cold and the creeping discomfort of a darkened room. It’s something you never really get used to, the shadows thrown high up the walls. It creates these odd dark spots throughout a room, like reality is breaking and pieces are falling away around you. Not like you need the environment to be more frightening.

The cold he feels along the other side of the doors drowns out Jack’s voice as he drones on about something, Will can’t really muster the energy to care. The cold whips his words away on a mighty wind and the creeping, deathly frost of an oncoming apparition begins to grow, crystallizing across the surface of his senses. It fogs them over, he’s groggy, woken up without feeling rested.

The frost bites at his esophagus and crawls into his lungs and suddenly it’s quite difficult to breathe, but why should he care? He’s tired anyway, what does it matter-

“Mr. Graham?” A voice drives the cold from his veins and suddenly he can breathe again; it’s disconcerting. Can you choke on air? Will realizes he’s rested his head against the door and looks up to be met with a full moon face and dark hair that shines. Too young to die. No, not you, not here, not now, not-  


_“Mr.Graham?_ ”

Not Abigail. Never mind. Will hastily stumbles out of her way as she passes, pondering how easily she could have passed as the Hobbs girl in the darkness. But she didn’t have freckles, and her face was just a little more angular, more heart-shaped and she wasn’t as tall, and still Abigail’s likeness had flashed across her face as the shadows cut across it.

Just for a moment, just for a few seconds he’d stared into the face of a dead girl long gone and maybe hoped she wasn’t. She didn’t deserve the earthly hell she’d been consigned to, but he can’t think about that now. Not now. He will face the faded imprint of another dead girl in the room beyond these doors and there is no time to be preoccupied with another.

They file in one at a time, swift with heads held high and strides long. They project confidence, the number one rule of entering an infested space. Don’t hesitate on the threshold, don’t let doubt creep in. It’s been harder as of late. Will’s eyes are drawn instantly to the cutouts of darkness gouged into the walls.

The blocks of black are surprisingly well-defined given the lights in the pool are turned down to the point that they don’t glow anymore; empty, sightless eyes set into blank slates. The shadows look even more jagged when set across the angles of the seats stacking up along the walls. It’s off-kilter, warping the floor and ceiling disappearing into the dark. Again, the operatives take their readings and report back sensations of creeping fear and miasma, the strongest being on the tiles on the pool’s edge within the bounds of Charlotte’s lane.

There’s a death-glow (Will can’t see it, but his sight isn’t the strongest and they have time until night falls in earnest) on the tiles in the same spot as the miasma and it’s defusing into the water. It’s not an unheard of phenomenon, but rare. The girl who looked like Abigail Hobbs reports back despair, helplessness and quiet, echoing weeping that fades into a muted underwater hum. She‘s succinct, but not uncaring, reminiscent of Beverly. It doesn’t help.

Surreptitiously, Will reaches into his bag and turns the knob on the lid of the jar under the guise or retrieving his water bottle. He can feel the eerie, under-the-radar release of energy, like a gentle exhale of cool wind. No one else around seems to notice. At least Lecter is cooperating. By the time Will has re-packed his water there are two neatly looped iron chain circles near the double doors and Jack is giving him a look he doesn’t like.

It’s not as confident as before, like he’s having quite a few second thoughts. It’s irritating, really, this odd indecisiveness. He’s not bone china, Will tells himself. His moorings may be built on sand but boats are made to float, even when their knots slip loose. He forces out the breath in his lungs and with it any worries that cloud his senses. There’s a clock ticking on the wall. The rhythm feels like the persistent tap of water droplets.

His feet are bare, when did that happen? The tiles aren’t so much cruel as unfeeling, inanimate. They keep any emotion from seeping into the tears. Will’s legs are dangling over the pool’s edge. He flexes his toes in the water, wondering what it would feel like to drop in.

Despair sat here, many nights ago. He remembers that.

Hopelessness, drowning, sleeping, a Shakespearean tragedy.

Lovers doomed to part. He remembers that.

Ha.

Like it’s his memory at all.

Somehow it is, he just can’t figure out why. A cold pair of lungs sit in his chest, unmoving and heavy and he can feel his heart still. He’s floating. The pool really isn’t so deep. Will wants to fight, to survive, but he just.

can’t.

be. 

bothered. 

  
  


A high, keening scream.

A face of shock and fear. 

W i l l . W a k e u p .

Survival kicks back into high gear.

His shoes are off and his feet are in the water and he is sweating and shaking and his lungs are mercifully empty of anything but air. Will gulps down breath after breath, greedy and afraid of the vivid nature of his visions. Not even Abigail Hobbs had felt that real. His feet are cold. There are voices calling for someone, something, but they’re lost as they bounce off of the tile and concrete. The world is sharp and clear-cut and jagged, every sound amplified tenfold and peaking uncomfortably. The edges are sanded down the more Will breathes.

W i l l , a r e y o u a l r i g h t ?

“Will, are you alright?”

Lecter’s spectral echo vies with Jack’s voice. The doctor is somehow comforting, an assurance that he’s here, at least somewhat sane. He remembers Dr. Lecter shaking him from that nightmarish vision, the distant shriek of terror from somewhere deep underwater, and a face too young to be so pale twisted with distress and indescribable fear. He doesn’t have to grip onto the fleeting but potent wisps of memory like he usually does; these feel like memories. More like bricks than grains of sand.

Will stumbles towards the iron circles, sitting down hard near the edge of one and beginning to put his boots back on. He can feel Lecter replaying what he gathered in Will’s mind for him. His jaw opens of it’s own accord, spewing his vivid sensations along with details he most certainly didn’t pick up on.

It’s nice somehow, listening to himself speak on autopilot; Lecter hasn’t taken control but he is guiding Will’s hands back onto a steady trajectory. The vulnerability and indecency has taken a backseat this time. Will can’t tell if he likes it or not. If it’s okay. Is he okay with this?

Yes.

No.

He continues to haphazardly babble, something about the girl’s life prior to her death. He can pick out words between the fuzz of his own thoughts, just barely. Is he okay with this?

Yes.

No.


	21. The Strangely Tangy Scent of Chlorine and Fresh Death Death (pt. 3)

The air is crackling. A new frequency has joined the buzz of the psychic radio, previously empty with the exception of Lecter’s personalized wavelength. Will is the only one bothering to stay tuned to that station, as if anyone else could hear it. Again, he reaches into his bag for his water and freezes as his hand comes into contact with the ghost jar.

As many times as the dead man has lit his head aflame with fear and panic as fuel, he did just douse the forest fire that had reared it’s head and threatened to break Will again. The brush is still smoldering though, and for the first time since he collapsed in the hallway of the FBPI, Will indulges that little curious voice. _Go on,_ it says, _it can’t hurt to test the waters._ The oils spill still slicks the water’s surface but Will can float. He won’t suffocate. He turns a second knob open on the lid.

He shouldn’t, he really shouldn’t, but Lecter’s cold smothers the fire for good. It’s like a fresh, cool breeze followed by a consistent chilly wind. He shouldn’t be put here, doing this, but another voice tells him he’s far past the point of no return. He hopes no one can hear Hannibal if he does start talking.

He knows they can, however, hear the newest voice breaking through the radio static. Mournful, sporadic, and faint, a gentle song on a lonely station. There is a spectral haze, and unnerving cold settling over the pool’s surface.It curls and spills over the edges and down the sides of the risers, oddly like the patterns created by nitrogen vapor, heavy and menacing.

The haze is concentrated at the pool’s edge, of course above the death glow. An obvious precursor to an apparition. The temperature is dropping steadily, degree by degree, unnoticed until the cold has already seeped into your blood and begins to nip and gnaw at your bones like starving dogs. Will could recognize the signs blindfolded and half-conscious, every agent can. It doesn’t make it any easier.

You can talk your mind into believing that the mist is just that, but your subconsciousness and body are screaming too loudly that something is amiss to care. You shiver and pull your limbs in closer to keep the deathly cold at bay and your subconsciousness plays with the shadows on the edges of your obscured vision. You wait and wait and wait as the silence presses into your ears.

An echoing hiccup is what breaks the silence this time. A sniffle, a sob, and uncontrollable weeping. A harsh wave of despair settles into Will’s chest and he prepares to shake the yoke of foreign emotion off, but it never quite locks in. It just slips off of him, pooling on the floor at his feet. He suppose he can thank Dr. Lecter for that.

Those inside the iron chains and out shirt their footing and shake their heads, temporarily postponing the full effects of the miasma and the creeping fear. Temporarily. Visitors are persistent like that, whether they bear ill intent or not. Will is still outside the iron circle, why is he still outside the iron circle? He’s in no condition to fight if things go south, not with the ghost jar. Why hasn’t he returned to safety? 

The crying echo is now paired with a faint apparition, a girl sitting where Will sat minutes before. He’s felt her despair. It leaks into the grout between the tiles, spreading across the floor through a thin maze too easy to solve, too easy to find targets. The streams of cold are like tentacles, fanning out across the floor and feeling feebly for anything to latch onto and drain energy from. Anything living.

Obviously, it new something had to be there; it wouldn’t bother if it wasn’t aware of a presence. When it tries to settle into them, coil around and crush their spirits like pythons, they shake their bindings away, as is routine. The Visitor is aware of them. Her apparition glows brightly; it’s a sickly sort of pale green, the kind you’d see on a corpse’s face filtered through lake water.

She is radiant and eerily pretty, the kind of pretty you see in young girls that make you certain they’ll grow up with fear trained as an instinct and a habit of watching their back. People are cruel that way. She weeps still more and through her sobs words slip.

_ W e w e r e h a p p y . . . s o h a p p y . . .  _

It’s a wail, a cry of remorse and regret. Will knows as though he was in her skin at the time what went down, why she bleats to an empty room each night. Tonight, she has an audience. Tonight, she will rest. The team inches closer around the radiant Visitor, hemming her in from all angles. They raise salt bombs and their rapiers are held as though they were facing a mortal enemy, flesh and bone.

Will feels another wave of resentment and despair wash through the room as the quarry turns to face herhunters. They seem temporarily immobilized by the sheer force of her anguish ,  and even with the odd sort of protection Lecter’s presence offers him, Will can feel tears welling up. In the second they stay frozen, the Visitor flings a luminous hand towards the girl who’d frightened Will earlier, the one who’d for only seconds worn the face of Abigail Hobbs in the darkness.

He watches the action in slow motion, as the girl reacts as the ghost claws at her. As her fingers paint the air between the two girls a sickly, incandescent green, Will feels rather than hears an unexpected roar growing from somewhere in the darkness, fast approaching. 

The sound is like a whip crack, tearing the air in the room a very deep and ugly new one, short and ragged and backed up by waves of rage. It ricochets around Will’s rib cage as it washes through him, and from the tiles he stands on a truly terrible sightemerges. It is no more distinguishable than a haze, appears for no more than a second, but just long and clear enough for Will to process who and what it is. Everyone else’s back is turned as time slows down so as to make sure Will and Will alone can watch this horrid spectacle.

The vibrant, coursing, undulating blue rips through his body and takes his breath with it, streaking like a shooting star across the floor. Their salt-bombs are already cascading towards the tile, only feet away from an explosion of white-green but it won’t be fast enough. Rapiers are rising into defensive positions. And all the while Lecter has mustered enough raw power to rip himself from the silver-glass prison in which he’s been caged.

He makes a B-line for the Hobbs impostor, faint and feeble, falling to pieces in the air, stripping himself to the bone. Tearing through their line, Lecter looses a roar of fury as he descends upon the feeble figure of the ghost girl. The sound is one that makes Will’s bones rattle in his skin, one of a lioness who’s bared her teeth at a challenger too brave and stupid to back down. _Every food chain has it’s acme._ He bears down upon her with undisguised malice, claws out and teeth bared. Her time is up.

The ghost girl too lets go of a last scream, high and keening, before vanishing into the vibrating air as the salt bombs explode and both figures are rendered obsolete by the spray of sparking green. Time speeds up again. Will leans, sweating, panting and bursting with terror against the wall, dropping his bag as a violent glow fades quickly from beneath the fabric. The usually silent disruption when Lecter’s jar is opened is gone now, the jar has gone dark.

He replays the scene from seconds before, from his own perspective, blocking out the second view burned into his memory. He saw through Hannibal Lecter’s eyes for a blink, half a second. Will knew the territorial rage, the hunger, the roiling blaze of wrath was somehow his own. _Just_ for a blink, _just_ half a second. For less than that space of time,his body had gone up in flames.

Will never knew what that protective ire truly meant when he felt it woven into the countertop and floorboards of Lecter’s house. He was unprepared for the torrential sheets of rage, the surprise, the memories gushing over the flood wall. He can’t seem to pick apart each current and each sloshing wave, but one caps high and sparkling white above the rest. There is no word strong enough to describe it: the thrill of speeding across an open plain, whether it be water or land or air and feeling the elements beat your skin. Unfiltered, raw, reckless freedom. The indulgence of the base desire to not only survive in an environment too harsh for someone to dare conquer, but thrive and enjoy the challenge.

The adrenaline of the climax, of the kill-and-eat. The feisty, passionate high of being  alive .

And as the salt settles and rapiers are re-sheathed, the last drops of feeling pass through him. The cold, harsh, animosity of life after death.

A silent, biting, bitter envy.

Will’s world is astir with the heat of a lifetime lived in half-seconds and the sudden cutting cold of death. His head spins. He leans heavily against the wall and vomits onto the tile.


	22. Aftermath

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey. Sorry I’m late, but this took a while to write and properly edit. I just wanted to make sure it was as satisfying an end to Charlotte’s story as I could give. It’s a bit emotionally intense, just keep that in mind.  
> TRIGGER WARNING: Vague mentions of suicide and discrimination (keeping it vague for spoiler’s sake)

The aftermath of the incident was a blur. They were in the middle of sealing the source (the tiles upon which the girl had sat while she waited for her own death; they’d gone cold enough to burn you something fierce) when Will had provided an excellent distraction in the form of his partially-digested dinner. That’s how Jack had so eloquently put it at least, looking drained And disheveled under the watery lighting of the FBPI’s medical wing. Will doesn’t really care much for what Jack is saying, something about Will being demoted to a spectator whenever Lecter is having tests run on him now, not a participator.

He can’t care much.

He’s got a small fever apparently, and he only now realizes how woozy he is. The ground beneath him rocks like a boat deck, an odd sort of lullaby like the rocking of a crib and an ode to empty nights at sea. Buildup of stress, according to the nurse. He’s lucky he hasn’t gotten sick. Jack said something about leave. But Will doesn’t want to take time off. He just tested the waters, that was all, and the results were hellishly grand. He couldn’t have predicted, not in his wildest dreams the reaction Lecter would have if given a larger opening to the outside world but it was horrifyingly fantastic to watch.

Will can’t quite recall why he even considered it, but that reckless little impulse to open another knob was both insightful and near-traumatizing. He wants to see it again. For an instant, a tiny, glittering speck of time, Will has known Hannibal as Hannibal knew him, truly cracked open his head and saw some terrifying majesty rise out of the smoke and dust and fire.

Unsurprisingly, his curiosity is marred by yet another voice in his head, bellowing over the shades of past houses who’s floorboards are stained with memories or doppelgängers with their own agendas and goals. Fear silences the chattering crowd. His mind already has a crack or two running through it, forgotten pieces replaced by figments of another’s lost life. Lecter could shatter it. He’d already proven his wrath’s extent and his drive for freedom could pack enough of a punch to free himself from a ghost-jar. _What havoc might he wreak in Will’s head if given free reign?,_ the voice cautions.

He was malignant and spiteful, his quiet, stalking malice would only expand it’s reach. And still that muted, curious, purr of a voice calls to him with one argument: why not? He has gained so much insight into cases with Lecter by his side to fill in any gaps he might have missed, he and Lecter are a horrible, well-oiled machine. The lions vie for territory and somehow, they might just be stronger together. The might just get along. And no one knows.

_There are reasons no one knows_ , fear persists, _good ones_. Fear is right. He had the unholiest of the unholy locked in a jar in his backpack last night and he _let the damn thing out_. What kind of madness is that? Around and around Will’s thoughts chase each other in his head as he drives home in the wee hours of the morning, of cases and ghostly girls long-dead, and the devilish man from who’s head sprouted a tree of antlers. He is kept on the tightrope of stability by the growl of the engine and the speed of his car keeping pace with half-formed ideas and worries and woes that lope alongside his vehicle. The gravel crackling under the tires wakes him from his daydreams and drives the wailing specters back into the shadows, making way for the unholiest of guardian angels to take their places, leering from the darkness.

The snakes that slither gracefully round and round the house, endless circles of weighty, ponderous power and smooth, slippery skin patterns fitting neatly together. The mongoose can only take on so many at a time. They wait for the moment his boots weigh down the wood of the deck before curling around his ankles and winding up his legs, creeping like grapevines across his body, reaching for his mind. They hang on still tighter as he entered his house, well-lit and inviting. Charlie is greatly pleased to see Will; she and Winston are skipping around his legs. They steadily constrict his limbs, coiling tighter around Will’s chest, curling up and about his head, a mockery of a halo. He falls into a chair.

For a moment he stands in the eye of the storm. The silence is deafening and the swirls of wind a fear barely brush his shoulders and he is able to look up upon a sky free of clouds. The pure quality of the blue astounds him. For a moment, there is balance. Not quite peace, though they are confused often enough. For a moment, there is a frozen second, an immortalized pause of the wave before it peaks, the tower before it falls, before the stones come crashing down and an eggshell shatters. There will be no repairs. The wind envelops him again. Will slides off of his chair.

Sitting on his dining room floor, Will bursts into tears. It’s not disconnected, not like how he’s felt for the past few hours. He is flooded immediately with something he can’t quite place within himself, like a masterfully detailed dream in which you’re not entirely sure how you got there. Something external exploring a world with only a description of a destination to guide them. It’s not Will’s emotions he’s feeling, but he can’t help but feel them despite the fact they do not belong to him. He doesn’t know how long he sits with his dogs, sobbing uncontrollably for a girl he never knew, but he can’t stop the pull and crash of the tide. Who is he to wish this suffering away? He is grieving her losses as if they were his own, her hardships now weigh him down. Will knows her story just as well as his.

Her ache is the splintering of his ribs, the crushing of his lungs, the constricting of his heart as the spectral snakes crush his chest and carve out his torso. There is a hole there, where his organs once sat, a missing piece that’s more like a chunk. A cinder block crucial to his structure; remove it and everything comes tumbling down in a moment of chaos and frozen fear. He’s gutted of everything she has to offer, any thing she lost she gives to him to feel. _They’ve been carved out like a block of soapstone, pliant to the pick of their suffering._

———————

  
_She was a natural swimmer, Charlotte. Lean and wiry, all grace and power in the water as a swimmer is apt to be. By all appearances, her life was as good as anyone would expect it to be. He parents were reserves and strict by the accounts of other parents, even a little conservative at times, but they loved their daughter, as was evident to anyone. She strove to exceed their expectations of her at every turn, she was confident and proud._

_And so was Leah._

_They bonded quickly over their drive, they took joy in riding the thrill of competition and speed. They’d ended up on the perfect team: close-knit and determined, buoyed by each other’s enthusiasm during meets and practice. Charlotte and Leah were the best of friends, like sisters lost and found again._

_And they found love within each other, a reflection of the other’s attraction._

_It was simple. Notes plucked from guitar strings, no dancing chords or calloused fingers, just pleasant, quiet sounds of girls not yet mature enough to figure out what they’d found. It was pretty. Pretty like the first flower blooming in spring, the one you fear might not make it at first but relish the little rush of joy it brings you. Gentle and tentative. It was sweet, like honeysuckle flowers. Leah had cleared an entire bush once apparently, all on her own while her brothers sullied their clothes playing football and soccer in the summertime heat. They’d found her surrounded by gutted white blooms, smiling mischievously at her cleverness and giddy off of honeysuckle. She’d taught Charolette how to pick out the beads of sweetness. They seemed to quiet each other’s roars and turned them into curious conversation, communication became their norm. Sometimes no words were spoken. Sometimes it was only a smile. But it was enough._

_And Charlotte’s parents never knew. Subtly was what did it. Little jabs here and there, a disapproving glance off an outright stare from time to time. And she never knew what to think. He mother and father encouraged her in her every endeavor but behind closed doors she worried. Worried for the moment their faces might fall and a chasm might open up in the earth between them. She knew in ever6 scenario possible they’d be silent, that the air would rush from the room once she spoke. They’d stand in the void between retaliation and acceptance. They’d look disappointed, like she’d fallen short of something, without actually feeling anything. It couldn’t really be described. She couldn’t live with that look._

_But Leah was fair. She was funny and she loved popping bubble gum as loudly as possible and listening to the crack of the echo. And she loved her ukulele with the entirety of her being and would belt out songs for hours whenever they had time to spare together. She was lovely. Leah loved moss and stones, and ceramic shards and bones found on the banks of the creek. She was loved. Charlotte would grapple with the urge to end whatever they had, but she couldn’t let go of the joy thrumming under Leah’s skin and just behind her eyes and the energy that crackled around her, lighting the air on fire. She couldn’t seem to put it out. As if she’d have the will to try._

_Charlotte pushed herself further and further each time she hit the water, riding high on waves of joy and thrilling, racing heartbeats. She pushed herself to open up to the girl who became confidant and companion for as long as they remained together._

_  
But all lovers, however young, however trepidatious and gentle and kind, are doomed to part someday. She would not see her parent’s faces fall and nor would she see kill a spark of joy she so ardently sought after and admired._

_The tile and concrete and luminous eyes set into white walls would tell anyone who was willing to listen he story. They watched it go down, you see._


	23. Wonderland and Looking Glasses

_ Most of Will’s time is spent sleeping without rest, fluctuating between reality and the other-world of his mind, expansive and outré. Abandoned and dilapidated gardens defy gravitational rules and fountains shoot downwards only to splash back up into their pools. Forests move without wind and whisper to each other, watching Will’s every move, stealing his breath bit by bit, making him lightheaded and dizzy. Their arms reach for the sky, scraping the clouds as they shift in closer, shoulder to shoulder, narrowing his path and forcing the canopy ceiling higher. _

_ Staircases set at rakish angles lead to a mezzanine caging a living chess game, the field lined with cypress trees and statues, black dahlias and vines that creep up onto the mezzanine’s Corinthian support columns. The statues look on with interest and somehow their faces—downcast and out of sight—wish and long to breathe. _

_ Dr. Lecter and his entourage of tethered souls play with remarkably well-disguised ferocity, though none match the doctor’s vile glee, pitted against his subordinates. He moves about with grace and haste, the Queen dancing amongst her subjects as they topple with ease. Hannibal’s knights are stags with garlands of fire encircling their antlers and they spear and roast the pawns as they fall and although his puppets tumble one by one he knocks out two for every casualty. _

_ Abigail has not moved from the King’s place, from the throne on the square, unwilling or unable to leave her sanctuary as Lecter weaves a safety net around her. Each assassin falls and the stags make meals of the dead as their bodies crack open to sprout garish blooms and ripe, fat fruits of no name and marvelous taste. The juices squeezed from these is pungent and heady, and Will can taste their tangy sweetness in the breeze from where he sits on the mezzanine. His mouth waters. Something is feels distinctly Eden-y about the fruit, like he’s not supposed to smell it and still he is captivated by the scent and the jovial, majestic violence of Lecter’s retaliation. _

_ And he is within moves of winning his game when a sickening crack echos across the playing field. All eye turn to the white king’s square. The statues seem to shift their heads. All watch in horrified, mournful awe at the realization that Abigail has fallen from her place, her stone split in spiderwebs across her face and neck. Debris scatter across the board and the breeze ceases it’s blowing. A storm pushes over the horizon, closing in around the miniature stadium. The wind was a warm front. _

_ A silhouette stands before her crumbling body, a blank slate of emptiness which the universe didn’t quite finish filling in. Lecter turns, blank and lifeless towards the black figure, a cutout in the fabric of reality positioned in front of his companion. Empty space that moves between the bedsheet and the flashlight in a mock puppet show. Lecter reaches out towards it, and with this motion comes his ire, his god-like stature and rage. _

_ It dissolves into an intoxicating mess of dark fruit and flowers, their heady odor concealing a bitter, rancid aftertaste, an afterthought to the decay and purification it manifests as. Lecter’s hard, cutting gaze slices through the remains again, a torn-down mirage that reveals nothing but smoke. Turning to his fallen charge, tenderness and caution release the ridged tension in his shoulders. Like a parent cradling their child, Hannibal bundles the girl into his arms and returns her to her throne on her square, propping her in the chair as though it might bring her back to him. _

_ She looks so much smaller now, much more fragile. For an instant, Will sees his face superimposed on her stone. _

_ Knowing that her pieces are scattered like broken china, the tautness weaves into Hannibal’s shoulders again, scolding him for the indulgence of a whim he knew impossible. He steps with the same grace as before, albeit with more conformity in his stride as he vanishes from the playing field, followed by the silent steps of his feathered stag knights. Will can hear his footfalls echo through stone and leaves and oncoming storms, deeper and deeper they go in pitch, weighing him down. _

_ They thunder through the building itself, rolling across the earth in time with the rumbling of the heavens. Ducking his antlered head, the man with the crown of bones steps onto the balcony, looking out at the clouds stacked high on top of one another and sighs as the wind picks up again. His silks trail blood and dead flower petals, the blooms rotting off of his antlers as he passes Will with a melancholy sort of smile. _

_ As the storm closes in around the massacre game, the antlered man sits upon his throne and gestures to the statues as they breath in the lighting air and the smell of impending rain and the shaking of the earth, that heavy, full scent of oncoming chaos. From a plinth placed directly across from where Will sits on a second throne, Beverly’s stony likeness looks up. She blinks at him. The first lightning strike splits open the sky with a shriek of impending labor. Water breaks. The firmament births rolls of thunder. Beside him, the man’s antler’s burst into flames.  _

Will’s half conscious dreams only disturb him further as time goes on. He is able to sleep more consistently, wake feeling rested but the dreams...When they do come, they are vivid and lifelike and he can recall every detail, every visual and auditory sensation like a VR headset with the quality of a hallucination. The cold of the stone and the sickly sweet scent of rotting fruit. The twisting knot of hunger in his stomach after he wakes from that particular venture towards the boarders of madness is all too real. He’s left craving pomegranate seeds. Will can’t seem to let go of the events of the pool, of all that he knew an all that was left to know. He is still moored.  He is still moored. He has not shattered. The cracks run deep and deeper, the water rises high and higher, he has NOT drifted out to sea. He’s not in pieces on the floor. He’s not going to be the cause of an inconvenient-at-best cut of someone’s hand. 

He says it because it keeps him on the Katy Freeway turned fishing line spectrum of sanity. 

———————  
  
  


_ The day Will had been able to trust himself enough to get behind the wheel of a car was the one and only day he drove during his leave. He’d left Jack a voicemail about his arrival and if he was a surprise, so be it. He had requested a meeting with Leah and Leah alone the very instant he was coherent enough to do so and he could banish his demons for long enough to do this. It was vital. _

_ Will wondered on the car ride over whether or not that was actually him talking, or did Charolette still have a firm hold on his mind? Did that matter? He felt the stalking, loping gait of the shadows rumbling alongside the car again and perished his doubts. The specters will roam the woods near his house today, ducking and shrinking away from the pale, watery sunlight.  _

_ The FBPI building was just as foreboding, inspired the same drop of the stomach every time. The concrete and iron and constant bustle are an odd form of comfort; something is normal, finally. He ducked his head and pushed past the doors and the people. Normal people, as normal as they can be. He forced his feet forward, one by one, until his step count stacked up as high as the sources lined up to be incinerated, wiped from existence. Not so with him. _

_ Will wondered about the preservation of his horrors, the way he was unwittingly compelled to set those fragmented visions in amber. The resin is pure and untouched, uncluttered unlike so many of our memories. These are clear and glassy and smooth and polished, cared for despite everything. Locked behind door after door of silver and iron. _

_ The conference room door materialized in front of him as those thoughts crossed his mind. With the same strange, not-quite-reckless abandon he felt as he opened Lecter’s jar only a fortnight before. He knew when he arrived back home he would be plunged back into the viper pit of horrors he kept archived in his head, erasing any progress he’d made. Still, he turned the knob and pushed to door open to reveal an room empty of people save for a girl. She jumped about a mile when the squeak of the hinges cut through the air. _

_ Leah looked as though she hadn’t slept a wink in the time since Will had last seen her. He took a seat across from her place. She looked across the table at him, knowing only a fraction of what he would eventually tell her. _

_ And he did. _

_ He spoke of the night that had doomed him, of the creeping, constricting despair that had sat on those tiles as it reflected on it’s own end. _

_ He told her everything he knew of Charlotte’s life, every happy moment, every memory immortalized and preserved in pristine condition that were now housed in his head. The joy she felt that was now his to feel. _

_ He professed Charolette’s love and it was then that Will realized they had never had that exchange. For a fraction of a second, he was the dead girl. Whatever was left of her removed his hands from the wheel. _

_ Leah saw it pass over his face, that minute realization as the feeling faded. _

_ They broke down that day. All three of them.  _

_ As Will sat in his car, dreading the journey home, he got the unmistakable sensation of having forgot something very important. He had everything he’d brought with him. _

_ He wondered, as the footfalls of shadows began to join the rumbling of the car, if it was Charolette that he’d left behind. _


	24. My Demons Guard The Rabbit Hole From Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, sorry for posting off-schedule, had a thing that ran late.

Will’s sanity is hung by a thread. He knows this. He knows the cracks run deeper and deeper each day he hangs onto the memory of Hannibal’s outburst and his own recklessness, but he can’t help it. Curiosity will one day kill him. He burns lavender each night. It takes the edge off his sleeplessness, but never quite lulls him into the daze he needs to properly rest. The wonderland dreams keep cropping up now and then, each more confusing and complex than the last and still the antlered man pursues him. Will no longer enters the woods near his house. The demons hiss and leer at him from the slanting, dappled shadows.

When Will returns to work after a multitude of tests and diagnosis come back negative, Jack still insists Lecter should be locked away. Will will never have to see him again, only interpret played-back recordings of his faint, warped voice, if that. But he doesn’t want to sit on the sidelines. He doesn’t want to play the game either. Will is of half a mind to steal back Lecter’s jar and he knows what it means. He’s gone too far this time.

He can’t unwind Hannibal’s voice from his own thoughts, and still he’s sure they’re his own. Logic tells him he’s batshit crazy, insane at the clinical level for considering it. And the wild, screaming voices in his head, the ones society would look upon in fear and cringe back if they ever tried to extend their claw-fingers towards the masses, they say what they’ve always said to him.  _ Why not? _

Jack keeps a watchful eye on Will during the next days as the sunlit hours grow cold and the nights long. Winter arrives, it’s long, dark cloak spreading a chill and snow across the ground. Light come the storms, sporadic, and as the season progresses they won’t grow in numbers, but in strength. Visitors like this time of year, the extended darkness and lack of sunlight lead to general drop in mood. Stress of holidays and the shortening of daylight are no help, and they feast with gusto upon that energy, growing stronger as the night of winter grows near and preying on any so unwise as to leave the shelter of their well-lit homes.

Will understands why, but can’t help feeling irritated—or was that Dr. Lecter again? He is so certain the Visitor has a foothold in his head, and yet how can he be sure? He can’t speak to him, not from out here while the doctor is locked up behind silver-glass and iron doors. He is aware of the occupancy of the rooms of his mind, but the occupant hans’t interacted with the staff and no one has seen him. And they begin to wonder, curiosity getting the better of them. Questions and queries and temperamental, half-formed hypotheses jet around his head, bouncing off of each other in their blind frenzy, rebounding off of his skull. They rattle around in his head each time he passes the vault doors. Each time Jack pushes a possible visit from Dr. Frederick Chilton (“Just to have a second opinion.” Will never believes him).

He knows too well the echoing sounds of the halls in the BSHPTT because he’s walked them before. The cold and clammy nature of the place despite it’s good intentions. It’s where children go to grow into their own instabilities, their weaknesses fester and bloom and rot. Their minds prey on them, the ones lost to the near-fatal affects of overexposure to the other side. They are what give the place it’s cold. Each time he’s set foot in the building he can feel the rattling, raucous shaking of the walls, the Visitors and their hosts, the last remnants of their existence tied up in human minds. They shake the walls of their cage, beat the bricks and concrete while their hosts sit passive and almost catatonic. 

There are adults there too. Only a few. Some too tightly wrapped around their possessors that they can’t unwind themselves, not even as their Senses fade. Their skin grows around their bonds and their bones have splintered and healed bent  and bothering bodies are weak and unstable from years of being contorted around the cruel wire structure they grew in. Like mishandled bonsais, they swell and bloat and shrink painfully, invisibly. Will saw it the one day he caught a glimpse of them. Bent bones and stretched skin. He hates the idea of becoming one of them, a victim of a metastasized parasite.  Unable to live with privacy, not permitted to die alone.

Will can’t bear that. And yet, he still wants the opportunity to engage with Lecter, to pick what remains of his ghostly brains on his own mind. He is a blurred figure to himself, a silhouette wavering against a blazing firestorm. He is curious as to the nature of Hannibal’s motives, his past, his army of tethered souls with wings plucked too far down. His menagerie of personalities and people, burned away to leave him trapped in glass and silver in an iron box for however long he is of use.

He burns, Will knows Hannibal is the fire that blurs his lines being cut down left and right by icy jets of water. Contained and dissected by adults playing at the games of children in science class with far more hazardous materials. There is a resentment, a stubbornness and pig-headed nature to his grudge, this unrelenting desire to let the smoke and the ash break the streaks cut into him by the fire hoses. He will not be forgotten so easily.

And so Will finds himself pacing feverishly outside Jack’s office, unable to sit down properly for fear that his heart might explode in his chest. His thoughts have confined themselves to separate rooms in the hotel of his head, while only one guest is up and about, silently stalking the carpeted hallways. Hannibal Lecter is enjoying this quiet pacing. “-Will. Will. Hey.” Jack nods towards the desk in his office, beckoning Will to follow. Will can feel the suspicion thickening the air. He should have just sent an email. Jack knows, he has to know, otherwise he wouldn’t sit there looking like  that. He’s a behavioral specialist, of course he knows. And soon, very soon, the request if forced out of his mouth. Too soon. He feels his jaw move and knows instantly that there are other hands on the wheel next to his own. They sound less like him. Maybe that’s a good thing, he probably wouldn’t have said anything anyway.

“Could I arrange a private meeting with Dr. Lecter?”


	25. Hell Has Frozen

At this point, he can’t blame Jack for anything. Sure, he’s repeatedly sent Will into the crossfire and endangered his mental stability one time too many because he couldn’t accept what was in front of his eyes, but he’d embraced the hell he thrown Will into eventually, dove in himself.

Somehow that grim finality had been worse. And still he pushed Will, weaker than before, but drove him for results. They needed information then. They needed to know what they might be up against. But now, this, here, this is Will’s doing.

Jack’s face had twisted in utter shock. He’d gone very, very quiet and somehow, Will had held his ground. When someone like Jack yells, he folds, quietly, slowly backing into the wall. He shrinks as Jack grows. You don’t stand up to that, and yet. And yet. He wonders if it might be Lecter again, and prays that somehow it isn’t. He doesn’t like the confidence, but a part of him rolls over as it restlessly sleeps, eager to wake and rip down his confines. He relishes the small destruction.

He _wonders_ about Lecter. His fear of the man, his worries of becoming like him, have gone. The doctor has done him few services in comparison to the disservices he’s payed him in their time together, but Hannibal has stripped him of his fear. Left him with nothing but abandon and his own twisting, creeping drive. 

He works his way through the maze of Jack’s defenses, chloroforming the guards of his arguments against it and cutting down his counterpoints. Manipulation is an inherited skill, something from years of listening to desperate, lonely souls talk him into insanity, and of having just about enough of everything. Jack agrees.

But. 

Sadly, there will always be a but. Jack is not stupid. 

He makes a point to speak to Dr. Chilton about an evaluation. Will can’t fight that, no matter home much he may have wanted to. Frederick Chilton is an irritating man a best, witty and, painful as it is to say, horribly intelligent in his own way at worst. Will dislikes the man strongly, but there are sacrifices that need to be made.

By evaluation, Jack really does mean evaluation, but Chilton will take it as an interview. There is very little information you can glean from interviewing a vacant host of a Visitor, and those who still have anything knocking around in their skulls are most likely too panic-stricken to say much about it. It’s why the Baltimore State Hospital for Psychic Trauma and Treatment isn’t really a hospital. Like insanity, psychic trauma has no solid medical definition, it’s purely legal. No basis in medicine or in treatment.

They can fight each head of the hydra one by one, diagnose and treat disorders and conditions, stuff plastic orange bottles full of pills and sedatives to bottle up the ‘problem’, but they can’t ever seem to hit it where it hurts. Never bothering to find out why, only what to do. Some people get better. Some people get worse. No one knows why. They duck their heads and move on, just like the rest of the world. Live with it.

Because of this, Dr. Chilton will use it to his advantage, he is sure, a free chance to pick at Will Graham’s brains, to learn as much as he can under the guise of professional curiosity. The illusion of progress, of getting better while getting worse.

It would be a cold day in hell before Will Graham would give an interview, and now it appears Hell should be expecting a white Christmas.

———————

The walk through the BSHPTT is both tedious and terrifying. Will has seen these walls and these halls time after time and still they seem to frighten him anew, creeping indecencies of a life bound to a place and to death are fresh in his mind. Dr. Chilton is crisply dressed in a suit Will knows Frederick thinks looks good on him, holding himself high. Today is a good day, then.

He can’t argue with Chilton’s choice, the suit is expertly fit and he positively glows with pride, but Will can’t help hating his guts even more with that cool, professional smile plastered on his face. Any papers that require a signature have been signed quickly and without complaint and as Will vanishes into the depths of the building, he can’t help wonder if he’ll end up here himself in the end.

Time conquers all and Death comes for everyone; this building is built with the blessing of both, and Will is in Death’s good graces, sitting at his right hand. The seat is an uncomfortable one. 

Chilton acts as expected, prying and picking and poking without actually getting too close to anything that might count as infringement of the rules they set up. He’s not going to push the walls of the house down, only test their strength just a bit. The doctor segues neatly into evaluation questions set in between his own, and Will has to give him credit for how smooth his transitions are. Frederick has though this through. Still, he’s irritatingly thorough, and their interview exceeds any expected time limit.

Will acts through the evaluation questions and dodges what he can of the ones that pry at him with leering grins, lips pulled back over grimy teeth. They snap at him, eager to satisfy their hunger while they have him. Anemic and starved, they hunt for fresh meat. When he is released, they glower at him and whimper and screech as he leaves. 

The night before, Will burns lavender and sets up his collection of silver and iron charms, common gifts on birthdays or any occasion. Necklaces, bracelets, pins, pendants. All flashy weaponry. He hangs them up around his bed and flicks a mobile set above his headboard, watching the shapes spin. It’s supposed to be for new-borns, a ward and a decoration like so many shiny trinkets today. Will makes some of his own charms, replacing the flimsy figures with more intricate designs.

His designs.

A small bowl that hangs between the spinning charms and the ceiling anchor filled with ground-up lavender. The structure of the mobile is symmetrical and pretty, shiny charms of animals and figures from his dreams. A dog stares alertly out of his window while a rabbit revolves around a fox. It keeps the cursed walls of his house from closing in around him, creeping closer so as to better hear the mad ramblings of the voices held hostage in his memory. Will watches their merry chase as he drifts away to fields of lavender and sunlit tabletops, elks and chess matches born of blood and vile fruit full of dark and swarming flies. 

Will has never been more eager to enter the FBPI building, never more accepting of the cursed things that are stored within it. Never happier to walk towards his probable demise. He lied his way through his evaluation, he lied his way past Jack and Frederick Chilton and every other eye trained on him, he passed. He’ll be the first not to play by the rules, but when has anyone who wanted a head start ever fallen in line?

Those who’ve grown into cheaters and liars sweet-talk their way out of anything and fawn and kiss ass when they need to. Those are people who win wars. They are the warm front that precedes the storm, those who leave chaos festering in their wake and test people’s reactions when they wave a torch recklessly around their head during a cool fall night in a forest blanketed with fallen leaves.

They watch the fire and give it its practicality rather than its danger. Fall of the tightrope when they know it’s time to disappear. Die when they’re bored and live when everything around them goes to hell.  _Why bother balancing on the tightrope made of fishing line that your sanity is_ , the voices spit at him, muttering vile afterthoughts into his ear as he passes through the doors.  _Insanity’s highway is so, so many more lanes wide_.

Hannibal Lecter’s jar is already in the room when he enters hearing the iron close in behind him. The jar is sealed. Somehow, Jack won’t be listening. Will has no idea how he managed to snag that particular benefit, but he still rushes every movement he makes, as if he’s working against the clock to disarm a bomb. His time is limited, but he has time nonetheless.

Impatience isn’t the only one running laps through his veins, though. A fire leaps into life as Will jerks the knob open, exposing the grate and letting Lecter breath and settle through the room. The blaze bowls over his impatience, ripping through the ribbon at the finish line and setting the ground ablaze, screaming past the spectators and out of sight for mere moments only to set the forest of his mind, the backdrops this race alight in a blast of ash and heat only to collapse under it’s own weight after it’s peak.  Lecter knew the blaze would burst open and then fall in, seeming to recoil from the room itself. Will refuses to give him time to process. Lecter will answer him.

Somehow, Will has beaten the man at his own game, by his own volition or by Hannibal’s surrender he does not know. He does not care.

“Who was Abigail Hobbs?”


	26. All Around The Cathedral

_ “Who was Abigail Hobbs?” _

———————

Will can feel the doctor’s silence wafting throughout the room, the stench of death and the absence of breath. Of life. It tastes exceedingly bitter. Fear is acidic in ghosts; he is not afraid, this is an old taste. Not rotten, but stale and regretful, salty tears that spoil a meal. Will is counting the rhythmic beats of the seconds in his head, pushing Lecter as hard as he can for something. Anything. 

———————

_ As the shock rippled up through his body, wound tight around his bones and crushed through them, stealing away what little breath he had left, Will could not seem to loose the cry trapped under his tongue.  _

_ As the fragmented shell of a man still clinging to life brought some fraction of his hell out of his confines, as he sent a stillness rippling across the room in a frozen second, Will could not seem to find the proper words, no creak or groan of a question parted his lips for he had no air to form it.  _

_ As the fiery, bitter man set the air ablaze with his wrath, a he cracked and tore and split at his seams, still standing twice as tall and tenfold more wicked than Will had ever seen him, Will fought to find the breath in his lungs to form the query materializing in his mind.  _

_ It blew the fires away as it formed, a force so strong and cold and fierce it dared to snuff the blaze from his brain.  _

_ As Hannibal Lecter toppled through the tile of the floor, as he cracked and collapsed and came undone like a great skyscraper felled by the firmament’s wrath, as his metal and glass composure collapsed and his searing charge of power failed, Will was left with nothing to say. _

_ He could only breathe a last question into his mind and out into the wintry silence of their shared plane. _

_ Whydidyoulie? _

———————

In the seconds spliced together in his mind, memories threaten to snuff the blaze. Will can feel the unrest in the air, the strain. He pushes it again, silently willing the jar’s occupant into to speech. The room begins to dissolve as Will forces his focus onto the jar, pushing still harder at the silver-glass barrier.

The warped light inside flares angrily, spitting at him from behind the wrought surface, swirling in irritation. He’s getting somewhere. A wave of reckless abandon, clever and ruthless takes hold of Will then and there. His mind is kept barricaded and shut up tight every waking minute Will has, and for good reason. His brain is a magnificent menagerie of horrors, all smooth and shining and kept more or less safe it’s walls. They’re elegant and hazardous in the way a tiger is, radiant, all power and grace. He rarely opens his doors, and if he does it’s to peek into a past imprinted on a room or a place, let a person in. They are mindless things, Visitors, drifting idly through the crack in the door, brought closer by the warmth and breath and light of a place so full of history, so full of blood and death. They can almost feel again in here, for this place is as beautiful as they are tragic.

So he throws the doors of his mind wide open for Hannibal with a rush of wind, disturbing the dust of his memories. An ancient chapel with a skeleton engraved in the floor. The thing is aged and beautiful, trodden on for centuries and still hearty, still shiny and fresh as through new to the world. The windows cast long, golden spotlights where dust plays in the light, flitting in and out and around.

There is an echo somewhere, of what Will is unsure, but it is sweet and old and stale, like fragile love doomed to a horrid end. A memory brought back, like a harpsichord alongside a piano. The place does not belong in Will’s mind and nor does the music but they are his to use.

His design.

And though it is a place of worship, a place of quiet, there are no people hear to pray. From the ceiling, sparking, brilliant globes gently swing, round and rosy in the evening glare. Some beam at him as he passes, melancholy and beautiful, but most don’t, nestled and kept away in the cradling curves of the ceiling. Will can feel Lecter’s awe, letting out the sigh at the magnificence of the construction that Hannibal can’t. He ambles into the space, gently humming the the muffled, echoing tunes, impossible to place, impossible the pick out where or how. His feet are bare, cold against the unreality of the smooth floors in his head.

Will pauses, idling by one of the golden orbs catching the light the most magnificent of ways. He reaches for it, curling his fingers around it’s warm, sparking surface. Memories cast in amber, perfectly preserved in sunlit gold. Will collects them, a fragment of a Visitor’s essence to remain as they are captured and disposed of with little though to their life and what might have been.

He involuntarily sews them across the broken, open wounds that split him apart, burns that need skin grafts and cracks that need filling. They remain while he bandages the shattered parts of himself with memories, the knowledge that they are contained while also built into his structure, vines blooming through his bones. As beautiful as they are, they crack his skeleton. They don’t know their own strength.

It’s why people don’t care. Why the avoid Will, carving out a space for him as he makes his quiet way through the halls. They have every reason to fear what they might become. And the hollow souls Will can save, the ones he holds on to are sealed away, cast in amber and strung up from the ceiling. Some are oddly happy, if bittersweet, like the one Will cradles gently in his hand now. Most are not. Most are strung high up above, sparking like big cat’s eyes in the dying sun cutting through the windows. Kept far away enough that they won’t do harm, kept close enough that Will won’t forget. 

He turns to see a faint shade of the doctor, floating gently through the room, in awe of his collection. In fear of what he might know. In truth, Will knows very little of Hannibal’s life, but he’s seen just enough in his dreams and in visions that light up his eyes for a second or two to know something useful. But this place is fake, he’d never keep his memories like this. Hannibal wouldn’t either; instead, the doctor keeps rooms. Maybe the rooms are his recollections.

Will dislikes the mirage. He smiles bitterly, at least it’s pretty. A hollow crunch reverberates up through the ceiling, bouncing off of the arches. Will can feel the shattering just before it happens. It’s not something of his collection. He releases the memory he holds and turns to see Hannibal, horrified, crumbling away into the air, paper-white, paper-thin. The fragments sparkle and dance, capturing light before letting it pass. They reform.

A girl with a full moon face and new moon hair crystallizes before him. Will has never seen Abigail look happy before. But the girl beams, giggling and grinning like a child, the child she used to be. She flits about another form, a faint outline of a man who might have laughed with her. She falls. She freezes as she laughs, smiling to the sky as spiderwebs of cracked stone crawl across her face and neck. Her face falls silent as she vanishes.

The faint music has gone sour, irritated and altered in key. Minor. The sun has set with haste and a lonely sliver of a moon has replaced her brother, casting the chapel in cold colors and cooling the amber to milk glass with an opalescent sheen. What is left of Abigail Hobbs is swept away on lonesome whispers of wind. But those sparking fragments refuse to be taken care of so easily.

  
They regroup, reform again, and this time Hannibal is enraged. It is a quiet sort of thing, expressed by actions instead of words. He sucks the air from the room but this is Will’s head he’s in. He reaches and gropes and swallows up everything until there is no life left and still Will remains. Hannibal can’t hurt him. Not here.

Again, though, Hannibal is in Will’s head. He cannot hurt him here, this is Will’s turf, but he  can  temporarily destroy this fabricated setting, watch the world just outside the windows crumble like a child’s block tower because Will only built enough for the illusion to pass the test. He probably will. After all, Will just sent a wrecking ball flying towards Hannibal’s walls when his defenses were weakest. The sight of this place, the detail. Thank heaven or hell for Will’s imagination.

The game is up now and a smoking hole has been blown into Hannibal’s fortress. There will be no scaling the ivy or climbing the bricks. He’s gotten shot in the side one to many times for that. Will can feel the agitation in the room before the structure itself reacts, before the land outside crumbles away and the moon falls out of the sky. As blood begins to pour from its cracks, burning away anything it touches. Pixels of dust fall from the ceiling and as Will looks up to watch the dying beauty, the stone comes crashing down to greet him.

The moon’s blood washes away the world and for a moment, both are suspended in empty space. Lights begin to pop through the darkness and soon the drifting snowflake speckles of darkness are driven back to their places by the glow of memories. The room is vast and circular with doors set into the high, dark walls, all spiraling upwards into obscurity. Amber recollections are set into the walls above them. There is a peculiar pattern around the rim of the room, almost like the reeding of a coin, but flattened somehow and set onto the face’s edge. These long slabs buzz and shiver and pop out of the floor, rising up the walls in a spiraling staircase, meeting each door as they go. With heavy, satisfying, mechanical clicking sounds like the various ticks and clicks of a clock mechanism, they settle into place, new tiles replacing the ones that vanish each time they rise to meet their door. As the stair meet’s its entryway, the memories shine a little brighter.

All in a breath Hannibal sees it. All in a moment Will lets him see. Ejects him. Shuts the doors to his head and locks them up tight, disturbing the dust once more and throwing everything back into darkness.


	27. Dragons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the late post, had something scheduled yesterday.

_ All in a breath Hannibal sees it. All in a moment Will lets him see. Ejects him. Shuts the doors to his head and locks them up tight, disturbing the dust once more and throwing everything back into darkness. _

_All in a breath. They still have time to talk._

  
———————

_It never made it into the news. Not even the senior agents new of it. Only a handful of adults and a dozen or so who worked full time in the vaults were privy to the disappearance, for no one wanted a panic. Half of the FBPI would be sacked and replaced if people knew, and that was being kind. The agent’s families would panic, pull their children away and back home if they knew how bad things had gotten. People would talk. Jack might already suspect him, might even fear for his safety and his sanity._

_Tough love would be the inevitable if anyone figured it out. They wouldn’t. They can’t. If they did, he’d end up in very darkest rooms of the BSHPTT and under Chilton’s smug and watchful eye, forever subject to test after test, all under the guise of research and for his betterment and all who would come after him. At least that was what Chilton would say. Jack would pass him by on each visit, offer him a blank glance, something painfully hopeful maybe? Disappointed or empty of anything. He would walk away, leading behind him his next batch of lambs, unsure if they would be marked for slaughter. Will would not stand for that indignity. He would not die like that._

_Will was told Hannibal Lecter would be moved to a higher-security location within the next few days. People on high places who’s eyes had been on security cameras and who’s ears had been next to keyholes had decided to ‘take him off their hands’. They’d outlived their usefulness and too many mistakes had been made, too many allowances overlooked. There were others who could handle it from here._

_Will had seen it a handful of times before. A particularly powerful poltergeist might bewheeled away into a truck with an escort of grim-faced Sensitives who’d found the thing. No one spoke of these incidents, only in whispers and short conversations kept to only a few words amongst the agents lucky or unlucky enough, depending how you viewed it, to make this mysterious journey._

_Will remembers loading into the back of the unmarked van, the chill of the room in proximity to Lecter’s jar. He remembers the hollow faces of the survivors of that fateful night now smoothed over by washed-out light of winter. Their fear is evident._

_He remembers sitting next to Hannibal, keeping his nerves in check, keeping his eyes on the foggy, downcast gazes of his fellows. Will remembers the silent turn of the knobs. Two of them._

_He remembers the strain, the pull and the push and the twist of the air in his lungs as Hannibal fought with all he had to push some part of himself out and to jerk the wheels of the vehicle with unexpected vigor. Will remembers the slip of the floor beneath his feet, the sudden rush of air beneath the floor, the kind of sudden flood of intense unease you get when a plane’s wheels leave the ground._

_He remembers the uproar_ _of shrieks and the glazed faces around him already coiled up with unrest and clouded with anxiety explode like a barrel bursting it’s hoops. Fragments of metal and crazed panic flew as the van spun and flipped on snow and ice._

_He recalls the silence and the peak of the discomfort as Hannibal used what was left of his energy to ensure they remained alone. Manipulating the children’s minds into a state of clam, or sleep, almost ghost-lock._ _Will remembers the bitter, biting cold and the knowledge that if they didn’t arrive at their destination on time, there would be an utterly insane search effort._

_He remembers the constant, overhanging anxiety, the lack of time, were they out of time to hide? The swing of a golden pendulum in front of Will’s eyes marks the seconds as they slip by. It hands from the ceiling in his room of doors, swinging down out of the darkness, catching the minimal light._

_ He remembers the bruises and the hopeless stagger back to the wreck of the van just as it’s occupants were waking. He recalls lie after lie after lie, no, I just woke up, I don’t know what happened, oh god, he’s missing?! Oh fuck. Will remembers the comfort, the feeling of a scared child shivering in the cold. He felt sickeningly paternal. Abigail. Beverly. People he couldn't save. He remembers shivering in the cold draping his jacket around the shoulders of a frightened child.  A child.  Resentment has been left to fester, he realizes. _

_He remembers the cars and the flashing, dizzy lights and question after question and bandages. He remembers his wrist aches. His nose drips blood. The feeling of light-headed from the blood loss. Lecter did his job well. He remembers the empty ride back toe the FBPI. The questions, the pounding in his brain. No, I don’t know where Lecter is, I was unconscious, Jack. He remembers wondering if they’d ever find the jar. Probably not._

_Will remembers the act, the hinting, the almost undetectable signs of instability, the first wave of warnings that someone will, whether they know it or not, surrender to their Visitor. He’s watched it happen before, just a handful of times. Minuscule behavioral shifts, little things. He remembers each and every tic, every fine motor movement, every microexpression and breath and stutter and skip. There has to be a hole somewhere in his story, in his performance, some little inaccuracy. He remembers wondering if they’d ever find it. Probably not._

———————

They’ve cleared out by now, each car and agent and officer. The search parties have retired for the night. Jack wouldn’t be able to make them stay that long. Will’s high beams cut through the darkness, weaving through trees and white and naked branches as they reflect back off of the snow. It’s even cold in his car as he pulls over by the roadside.

Unlocking the door with shaking hands, Will exhales his worries into a plume of breath that dissipates into the sky clear of clouds, full of stars. He likes watching it on dark, cold nights, puffing out his cheeks, blowing clouds out into the night like a dragon’s fiery breath. Maybe he could beat a dragon. Beat the demons under his floorboards.

It’s oddly comforting, the lack of light, the quiet. It reminds him of the nights he stands out in the fields near his house, watching the light of his windows shine in the dark like a boat out on the water. He can pretend that his dying headlights are the windows and Will has found himself with a little bit of peace. Somehow.

Will recalls the tree, the snow, the roots. He retraces his steps with grim determination, listening to the lack of an echo. Footsteps don’t do that. In writing and in films they do, but footsteps aren’t that loud.  Not out here. He remembers the tree. Close to the road, but not close enough to be immediately suspicious. Not far enough away that he’d have left any substantial tracks in the snow, at least not ones he’d have to cover up. The hollow in the knot of the tree roots is perfectly sized, Will recalls thinking, large enough to hide something, small enough to pass by unnoticed. Easy enough to pack snow over and smooth out.

See, that’s the thing with snow, it’s so incredibly telling. And hordes of people come tramping past; they’d probably stepped over the very spot. Gently digging through the snow, Will pulls the jar coated in frost and flecks of snow from the ground.

  
The ectoplasm, a blue hombre, flares and shines in the wintry darkness.


	28. Our Cyclic Nature

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Shoutout to AquaQueen for this

Snow quiets things. It hushes them. The shadow-people no longer lope alongside Will’s car with their ungainly brand of evil grace, or maybe he’s just lost them somehow. Maybe it’s Hannibal’s presence, the ectoplasm in the jar floating lazily around, casting soft shadows along the upholstery of the car.

The jar is closed, but Hannibal’s odd calm is still present. Will wonders if it’s in his head. Who is he kidding, of course it is, it’s Hannibal Lecter who’s made a home in his head after all—just as he’s cut out his own (admittedly less neat) little corner in the very neatly organized headspace of the doctor. That passiveness though, it’s a little unnerving. Up until this point, during every interaction and mention of Dr. Lecter’s name the only emotions tied to it were ones of fear and respect, of caution and resentment for the hold he had over Will’s mind. But this, this is almost vulnerability, an uncommon quiet.

Maybe he was still recovering from the effort of crashing their van, of knocking everyone out for just long enough. But he’d done so much more, hadn’t he? Lecter had torn himself free of his confines to ensure the safety of a girl he never knew and for unknown reasons, but the point was that, for a moment, he’d projected himself beyond the bounds of his silver-glass prison. He was almost stupidly powerful, far beyond any Poltergeist or Limbless Will might have encountered. Witty, quick, too intelligent for his own good. Will wonders if he might not have ditched his demons after all. Maybe he’s only traded them in.

Will is greeted by the sounds of yapping at his door, cheerful at first but rising into a more of a barking growl as he approaches the porch with the jar tucked underneath his arm. Dogs are clever like that; pets in general seem to have an affinity for the supernatural. They hear and see and smell death in a way an agent can’t as if it’s a built-in function, not something left to chance. But they can’t be let into the field, they’d be too vulnerable with a lack of strong emotional control. It would be unethical.

But still, Will’s pack functions as a guard of sorts, alarms that sound when danger is near so he can collect himself before the fight. Tonight they do their job. As he shakes a light dusting of snow from his hair and coat, Will finds himself crowded against the door by many furry bodies, yipping quietly. Winston and Charlie seem to find presence of Hannibal Lecter especially disturbing; their hackles are raised and teeth are bared and they keep keen eyes on the jar as Will hushes them and shuffles into the kitchen. It’s late. They’d didn’t plan for this, did they?

———————

_Their conversation didn’t end there. They still have time, and again Will projects through their apparently personal plane of existence. He explains with as few words as possible, with images and snapshots that aren’t guaranteed to happen but it gets the idea across. The protection around Lecter will be weakest while in transport. He knows now that Hannibal might have a chance of freedom, no matter how this might go down. He will break himself out somehow. Will might have a chance at answers._

———————

Will considers the the time between now and that fateful night when the house, like an ancient yew, unfurled it’s branches to the world, proved that as spring came around it would thrive again. It breathed, turned on its lights, forced its cogs and gears to turn once more and it woke up. It pulled at its foundations, lurching at the sudden momentum and fell onto its knees as it separated from the ground, from its sleep of a handful of decades.

It rolled its shoulders and one by one worked the kinks out of it’s back and cracked it’s neck, satisfied at the pops and clunks of the long-dead gears grumbling into motion within the walls. It recalled dances and dinner parties. It stretched its legs, flexing each foot and toe as rust and dust and cobwebs fell away from the basement and floorboards.

It remembered the feel of deft fingers and a pencil and a scalpel and soon the cracking of its stiff knuckles echoed through the night as it rolled and popped and spun each joint, winding up, winding down, parts clicking into place as a furnace burst into flames deep within its chest. Its window eyes lit up with light and it remembered epics and stories and many eccentricities. Maybe it looked like Argus, it thought. Well, it didn’t think. Hannibal did.

The fire grew ever brighter, every more violent as each moment passes, as each inch of the house shook off the yoke of sleep and rose to it’s post. And as hot as it was, Hannibal Lecter still could not keep warm. And as fast and as hard as his victims worked, oblivious to their lives and surroundings until he roused them from their stupor, the flames did not make him feel anymore than he already did. Still the house remained cold. 

Carefully, Will sets the jar on the floor, marveling at the weight of the sound in contrast to the jar’s lack of considerable bulk. The floor of his bedroom seems the only really suitable place, but then again, not much of his house is suitable for this kind of work. There are quite a few loose things Will has scattered around his room, but he supposes if he’s going to get hurt, he’ll have faced worse.

Clearing an open space in front of the fireplace, he begins to work. Under the bed. Will slides an arm beneath it and removes a very thick iron chain with moderate difficulty, whipping up a standard double circle of chains, looping it twice around. The circle is small, but Lecter won’t need too much space in there.

Will inspects the room; there’s lavender in here for days and if the box in the corner isn’t enough of a safeguard, he doesn’t know what is. Salt would be next, wouldn’t it? He recalls each mission, each visitor and and each setup. Traditionally, he’d sit within the iron chains but to hell with tradition tonight. Not with Hannibal Lecter. Will knows he’ll regret the salt circle since the mess will be incredibly irritating, but he takes not precautions and generously layers the salt.

He takes another long look around his room, considering each charm and decoration. Two bracelets, each of simple silver and, hell, why not a necklace? A sizable glass jar stuffed with lavender, salt, and iron fragments to be smashed in an emergency only. Will feels oddly as though he’s accessorizing. He pauses, considering his setup.

  
Years and years and years of nightmares and horrors pressed into floorboards and roses with unchecked thorns blooming in his bones. Each class and seminar, each lecture and stab at dummies chained to the ceiling swinging dejectedly back and forth, sad sacks of stuffing he was told to pretend were the most potent remnant of a life once lived.

*Will hopes that he might have put some of them to rest. They weren’t sick, dying things to be _put down_. They were already dead, we just didn’t bother to put a coin underneath their tongue. They were left on the riverbank. It must be lonely. It must be unbearably cold.

Will shakes away his stupor and fetches a jacket. As he brushes coats and shirts away, he hears a sharp clattering, like metal on wood. It is, in fact, metal on wood; his rapier sits at his feet. It glints at him, an obvious reminder. He snatches it up from the floor, rolling up his sleeves and weighing the weapon in his hand.

Will finds the jar under thorough inspection by his dogs and he can feel Hannibal’s irritation. Perhaps he’s recovered slightly. He wants to think that it’s a good thing. Scooping up the cold glass, Will re-enters his room and locks the door. With whatever reach Hannibal his outside his jar, Will knows he can feel the wards and the metal and the flowers. They probably stand out like Visitors do to the living, eerily glowing and encapsulated by a hazy light like some kind of beacon. Will kneels in front of the chain circle and gingerly sets Hannibal’s jar in the center.

He’s back at the circle’s beginning again; god bless our cyclic nature.


	29. Like a Warning Light, Shimmering in Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to profusely apologize for the musical references in the next few chapters. I can’t help myself.

_ Will hopes that he might have put some of them to rest. They weren’t sick, dying things to be put down. They were already dead, we just didn’t bother to put a coin underneath their tongue. They were left on the riverbank. It must be lonely. It must be unbearably cold. _

__

_ Will shakes away his stupor and fetches a jacket. As he brushes coats and shirts away, he hears a sharp clattering, like metal on wood. It is, in fact, metal on wood; his rapier sits at his feet. It glints at him, an obvious reminder. He snatches it up from the floor, rolling up his sleeves and weighing the weapon in his hand. _

_ Will finds the jar under thorough inspection by his dogs and he can feel Hannibal’s irritation. Perhaps he’s recovered slightly. He wants to think that it’s a good thing. Scooping up the cold glass, Will re-enters his room and locks the door. With whatever reach Hannibal his outside his jar, Will knows he can feel the wards and the metal and the flowers. They probably stand out like Visitors do to the living, eerily glowing and encapsulated by a hazy light like some kind of beacon. Will kneels in front of the chain circle and gingerly sets Hannibal’s jar in the center. _

__

__

_ He’s back at the circle’s beginning again; god bless our cyclic nature. _

———————

There is a quiet, pale numbness that has wiped Will’s brain clean, hushing the blaze and driving it far, far away, over the mountaintops and out of sight. Just for a little while. Tentatively, he reaches over the double-coil of chains. It is the only thing standing between him and whatever hand Death has dealt him. This is what he will play. If the deck is stacked in his favor or not, Will does not know, but it will matter very little, very soon. The game will be up. It will be time to walk away.

With a disconnected sort of care, Will spins the first knob so that the minuscule grill hidden behind it is exposed. A sigh is released from the jar like a consciousness unfurling itself from a box, a snake uncoiling from its pile of silky scales and patterns. There is no breeze yet, but he knows eventually there will be. There will be a _bitter_ cold. Maybe it will be pressed into his floorboards like flowers into paper, dried and long-gone.

He turns the second knob and ah, there’s the chill. Mild, yes, but it’s there. The cold strikes Will’s hand first and the hairs on his arm stand straight like radar antennas projecting a distress signal that his brain doesn’t receive. Every fiber of him is screaming at him, ordering him to back off, back down, run far, far away.

He twists open the third. He is sure of his previous assumptions. He did only trade in his demons. There is a presence that has made itself known in the room now, one that travels by shadows and moonlight, relishing the power it draws for the absence of light and the flair and near-omnipotence it embodies when bathed in it.

Ponderous. Elegant and weighty. It hushes the voices inside the walls, constricting them. Will feels a mild pressure in his ears, like the feeling of walls too close to the sides of your head. The ones in movie theaters, the ones covered in fabric that gobble up any and all sound. Touché, Hannibal, or was that an accident? He can feel the pride seeping into the cracks between the floorboards, the little giddy acknowledgment of the man’s power. The chill in the room wriggles into Will’s skin.

He turns the fourth knob. The ectoplasm, shimmering brightly, flares. The air in the room is suddenly full, almost cramped, and for a second Will can’t properly breathe. The entity has further unwound itself and has pushed the atoms inside the space aside to make room, but the sensation fades just as quick as it came, and he can breathe again.

Vapor begins to spill from the open grates in great plumes of white and blue, luminous and graceful, curling across the floor. They look like the rolling, undulating patterns made by nitrogen vapor. They’re cleverly disguised feelers, Will realizes, as one swells and dips towards the chain boundary and snaps back, an ectoplasm burn the only evidence left. Probably not the best decision to do this on the floor. With more hesitance this time, he reaches towards the chain circle to twist open the fifth knob but stops before he can cross the line. The feelers clear a path for him.

The chill of the room at large is bearable but not all that out of place for a winter night, but the cold inside the chains nips at Will’s fingertips as he exposes the fifth grate. Cradling his cold hand inside his jacket, he watches as the feelers begin to spin upwards, winding around each other like vines twisting into one another, locking themselves in. The shape that rises high above Will is faint and unimaginably frail, but it holds.

Will’s free hand tightens around the rapier’s hilt. The misty figure twitches in irritation. He recalls the night when it all began. He’d kept his weapon ready and he’d been wound up like a spring in that office, that room empty of sound except breathing. Loud, obnoxious breathing. And silver. Iron. Of course Hannibal had felt irked. He wonders if that might have contributed to the nights disastrous end, the fact that they were armed. Hannibal would consider it rude.

With every ounce of self-control he has, Will releases the hilt of the weapon and lets it hit the floor with a soft clatter before pushing it a few feet away, keeping his eyes trained on the silhouette all the while. It seems to relax, just bit.

There is still a clear path for his hand and he reaches towards the jar to twist open the sixth knob. The cold stings his skin, itching, burning like heat. Will worries for floorboards underneath the jar as he pulls back his hand, hissing slightly at the pain. A wave of cold ripples through the room and forces its way into Will’s skin, wrapping tightly around his bones. But he’s dealt with vines that have squeezed him tighter, threaten to break him with more conviction than this. He’ll be alright.

Will considers the seventh and last knob. Might he have gone to far already? Would this even work? Hannibal is an unpredictable, chaotic thing, driven by forces unknown and endowed with power untested and unseen before in the natural world. He does not have time to stop and ponder. 

Will knows before he feels the rush. The spiraling twist and pull in his solar plexus whenever one looks down from some abhorrent drop from on high, that little voice that whispers giddily in your ear, ‘ _what if you jumped?_ ’ . It’s a sick little thing, that. He knows Hannibal is taking his shot. There is no more choice. There is no more backing out. Will has set up his own army of faceless pieces. There will be a checkmate tonight. The storm will cease it’s restless rumbling and the fruit born by fallen pieces will rot away, the board will clear for another game, another time after this. It all depends on who will fall. 

The air in the room thins, like it’s being sucked away into the circle of chains. Will feels very suddenly lightheaded, are his dogs barking at his door? And just as before, the air is returned seconds later, along with a generous gush of vapor from the jar. The lid is loose enough that he can see inside the jar just a bit, ectoplasm swirling near the top like some cartoonish potion about to spill over.

It shines and sparkles like a warning light, shimmering in blue, dancing innocently across the walls. The not-quite-liquid substance is nearly overflowing, inspiring a childlike fascination in Will, the one that comes with staring intently at a glass of water filled just over the brim and seeing it arch just slightly upwards, wondering how it doesn’t spill over. So the frogs with the brightest colors really are the deadliest, it seems. But it all depends on whether they fell threatened. Will knows that’s a question that has yet to be answered. The vapor spilling from the jar begins to thicken and drip like hot candle wax and shrieks as a drop or two spills onto the iron of the chains, sizzling angrily like bacon in a pan. 

_ Or sausage, perhaps? _

And finally, Will can hear him. If he were to let Hannibal out of his jar entirely, he’d be able to hear his voice as if he was alive, but this will do for now. His voice is like his presence: ponderous and heavy, but not in a debilitating way, no, no, this voice has a scalpel’s edge and a particular brand of irrefutable power, but he isn’t outright threatening. The snake hasn’t yet begun to squeeze. He embodies elegance and malice, and Will is somehow reminded of a less dramatic and far more wicked incarnation of Mufasa’s brother, Scar.

He can feel Hannibal’s scoff. He is so, so much more than an animation. The thickening tendrils of ectoplasm begin to bind together like creepers, winding and climbing over and around each other, rippling and contorting into an unsightly shape, luminous and an eerie blue. The thing twists and thrashes, and Will has half a mind to seize his rapier again as it grazes the invisible barrier of chains and roars in distress at the burn. A cool and bitter wind sweeps the room, but still Will refuses to move from his place in front of the circle of chains. The salt on the floor begins to blow out of position, but the chains and the jar hold firm.

And then comes the pain. A headache blooms very suddenly in the center of Will’s head, like a slash cut deep into his brain. He bites down to deal with the stabbing pain as yet another distant, hollow scream fills the room. Hannibal must be in great distress. The shape beats harder and harder on the inside of its prison, expanding and contorting viciously all the while. Might Will have misjudged him in some way? The wind in the room picks up sharply again and there is another spike in the pain, like someone took an axe this time and swung at the inside of Will’s head, like the feeling of a chapel ceiling rushing down to meet him.

His room seems to fall in with it, the walls pressing in further as his dogs howl and growl like Cerberus himself was at his door, sent by Hades to fetch the one that got away. He won’t catch him in time, that’s for sure. The violently swirling mass of ectoplasm threatens to burst the chain loop at it’s own expense and the bellowing roar reaches a fever pitch as the beast in the jar unleashes it’s hell upon the world. All of it. Every bitter, wretched whim. Each and every one of the filling up the room until there is no more space to fill and there is still so much left to give.

The beast blows it to pieces, wood and concrete spin like shrapnel out into the distance, not into cold and snow but into a space. Blank. Unfilled. A hole cut into the fabric of spacetime, something endless. Just for them. The very, very tiny world of Will’s bedroom, and the vastness of his mind. Hannibal’s mind. Suddenly, it is filled with brightness and gold, in a sparking flash of pain and sunlight. Will winces as the ache in his head doubles. Hannibal must feel this too, mustn’t he?

The Visitor tears away the stolen walls of the chapel. The memories that Will filled it with go crashing to the floor, amber sparking like blazing, sunlit glass as his fragmented phantoms take up their places on the battlefield. Some will stay, some will fall, but that’s chess. The pain blurs his sight. Tears prick his eyes. Through hazy, swirling vision and a mind rendered half-conscious by pain, he can hear the echo of a roar, a scream form far, far away. The ectoplasmic mass throws back its head; it resembles a thick, luminous rope, a snake of some kind. The thing twirls and contorts and squirms in what might be agony, squeezing itself out of the jar as the wind in the room blows everything back and away as it makes room for itself. It settles on the shape of a man.

Very suddenly, the pain in Will’s head recedes. How did he make it onto the floor, viewing the figure upside down? Perhaps this was how Hannibal saw him. Something that never really fit in the mold it was cast in. It didn’t melt properly. It didn’t pour properly. They weren’t neat and tidy things. Will rights himself very quickly, and takes his time to study the sight before him. The wind has died down, but a mist hangs in the corners of the room and curls of undulating vapor still pour from the jar. It refuses to touch him. It will coil and swirl around him, but not a single cloud will venture near. Will can feel their bitterness, their biting chill.

No ectoplasm made it past the chain circle but the chains themselves had been damaged as some long and massive beast had uncoiled itself from a jar too small for its size. The beast, however, is doing just fine it seems. He is still just as eerily luminous and detailed as the night Will met him; a strong, concentrated other-light. It does not shine or glow or spread, but it highlights each angle and curve of the man before him.

Still he is immaculately detailed, as though still alive, still breathing, but his chest his hollow and empty. No ribs to expand around lungs inflated with air, be it winter chill or the petrichor of post-thunderstorm breezes, he does not breathe.

Still his skin is shiny and bright, like the whitest marble or perhaps ivory. Ivory would be better. Only Pygmalion could have sculpted him with that level of care, carved him out of lumpy, malformed traits into something pure and clean. Still he wears that suit, that darkness dotted with stars, the ones he brings down to hang next to Will’s recollections.  _ Perhaps that’s how he keeps them _ , Will wonders,  _ how very Greek of him _ .

There is a beast in Will’s bedroom, floating only feet above his floor.

There is a beast in his bedroom that coils and stalks and lures.

It squeezes and pounces and snags you by your cheek. It will eat you alive.  But then again, Will isn’t the most palatable.

The beast in his bedroom is picky.

It shines like a star, a bright white mass of energy, but it never seems to truly glow. Its hellish divinity isn’t quite bright enough to reach us from where we are.

The beast in his bedroom tenses and shudders, rattling like wind chimes in a breeze. Will swears he hears the hollow rattling of bones in the distance. Hannibal Lecter, as free from his jar as he’s ever been, rolls his head back and pops the non-existent bones of his neck. The cracking sound is that of splintering bones and snapping tree branches. 

It has been so very long since he properly stretched. So, so very long.


	30. Like Crimson Bloodshed, Glimmering in Red

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Long chapter ahead, I kinda got carried away :)

_ The beast in his bedroom tenses and shudders, rattling like wind chimes in a breeze. Will swears he hears the hollow rattling of bones in the distance. Hannibal Lecter, as free from his jar as he’s ever been, roll his head and pops the non-existent bones of his neck. The cracking sound is that of splintering bones and snapping tree branches.  _

_ It has been so very long since he properly stretched. So, so very long. _

———————

Heisthedevil...heissmoke.

———————

Will Graham stands in front of what is left of Hannibal Lecter and absorbs everything he’s already seen of the man, everything he missed when the first met, everything he didn’t catch, and still there is more that he does not know. He is hungry for answers. Very hungry. His stomach ties itself in knots, out of nerves or ravenous appetite Will does not know.

Perhaps he may be able to piece together what he wants from fragments of this man somehow already missing pieces. Will just can’t figure out which ones. He can’t quite see how Hannibal is fractured, it’s not so immediately evident as his injuries may be. Hannibal is more whole, more put together than Will’s has ever been and yet. And yet.

And yet there is something hollow, some nook or corner in the palace of his mind, one Will hasn’t yet found. To be fair, he’s only thought to explore the foyer. But somewhere deep in the keep of his castle, there is a space. A crack, a fissure, something missing—not just anything. Wind blows through it’s emptiness, refusing to stay.

It is not a place deep below the ground or up high somewhere in tower, but somewhere no one would ever think to look. Ever the clever one. No one would ever be the wiser if he could help it. Perhaps the most obvious place to hide, but no, that’s too obvious a twist. Hannibal Lecter has played his game very well. He’s shifted each and every part of him around, unstacking his fortress brick by brick and reshuffling the placement of each so the weaknesses are best concealed. Ever-changing. But his plan is only so perfect.

He may have accounted for Will’s variable, but Will is still just that: a variable. Something unknown, an x in place of whatever we can’t yet see, an prickly, uncomfortable, _adaptable_ thing. _Troublesome_. That’s the thing, so far everyone else has played by the rules for the most part, their predictability is in their numbers and how they behave according to the rules.

Hannibal can adjust his equation in response, predict their reactions within parenthesis and their relationships to powers, but Will...Will didn’t come out of the same mold. His number is blurred and smudged somehow, so much so it’s been replaced with something we can understand. He’s ledgable, but still unidentifiable. Unpredictable. He refuses to play within the limits. And Will’s variable seems to have _royally_ fucked up Hannibal’s plans. Or at the very least some of his assumptions, his goals and ideas. Things just got a bit more difficult to maneuver.

Hannibal will dislike the exchange they will eventually have, but he did agree to it, back when they had only precious minutes to spare and every eye was turned away for a moment. Will can see it in the dark pits of his eyes. Like stars in the distance collapsing in upon themselves, his eyes are dark chasms with two, sparking pinpricks of light at their center. They dance and shine, never seeming to actually move. They don’t illuminate his face. Shame. Will wonders who would dare mess with Pygmalion’s carving, who paid the price for it.

They are almost holes in the luminescent ivory, the points of light at their centers the only sign of the shining mind beyond the exterior. Many multitudes stored within one’s head. The imagination is a beautiful thing, so crammed full of thoughts and dust and precious stuffing and still it has room for more. So subtly, the pinpricks shift, and the bricks of the castle and fort are reorganized yet again; Hannibal Lecter’s eyes are no longer focused on something far off in the middle distance like he’s tracking prey, but pointed directly at Will, through him.

Right into his eyes, focusing perfectly on the center of his pupils. The exactness of it all, the way he’s sure of what Hannibal is looking at is breathtaking, as if Will can see through the man’s eyes while watching through his own.

He sees seven star-crossed sisters running like hunters, running with the reckless abandon of the hunted.

He sees day and night from a spot he’s pinned to on the earth, a clearing in the forest, he is full, his hunger is sated as the sky churns above him. He cannot move. He ran and he ran and he ran free and now he can do nothing but watch.

Terrarium wall close around him.

He sees himself traced in Hannibal’s night sky. Will recalls his earlier thought. _How very Greek of him_.

He hitches a ride on Helios’ chariot when Selene retires. And far off in the distance he sees an unusually bright star, uneven in shape, a first draft perhaps? This is Hannibal’s mind. Two of them. Will longs to step towards them but then-

A whoosh, a groan of aged hinges. Golden pinpricks sparkle from far, far away. Will can’t see their glow but he can feel the doors in _his_ mind, ones he’s kept so carefully locked and guarded swing open. He whirls around in the firmament of Hannibal’s head to see the man standing in front of a set of double doors swinging wide open. The giant dogs that guard it—each of his dogs—have bowed their heads to him, tails in the air and heads laid gently on their front paws.

Will’s sentinels haven’t fallen. Hannibal hasn’t attacked them, although the boundaries between their minds at the moment is weak and he might have the power to get away with it. That would be reckless of him. An unwise move. Precious pieces would be lost. He pats them gently on their large noses, each snuffling in his general direction but never getting too close, amber eyes trained on him all the while though. Do they fear him?

And suddenly Will is back in his own mind, of his own volition, staring at Hannibal framed in the doorway. He’s seen Hannibal’s foyer, used it to his own advantage to break the man just a bit. Nearly broke into it just a moment ago. It’s about time he’s seen Will’s. He moved faster than Will had anticipated. He’s not stupid.

Though Will may be a variable to Hannibal, Hannibal is not entirely defined in Will’s head either and Will’s equation is not as neat. He doesn’t need the math to work out Hannibal, though. They stand in the large, impossibly tall room again, all dark and vague, fuzzy shapes except for the afternoon sunbeams in the form of Will’s recollections. The light from the memories shines twice as bright tonight.

It will be a battle lacking in verbosity as most of their true interactions are, instead somewhere tangled in the webbing of their minds. The doors make themselves known, and the stairs rise to meet them. A pendulum swings out of the darkness, shining gold caught in sunlight. It’s motion seems oddly restricted, as though it is descending into a pit. A marker of their time, keeping them on a schedule. It makes a strange, harsh, whooshing sound as it cuts through the air.

_Once, twice_. A strange, clicking heartbeat sounds in Will’s ears and the world begins to move backwards with the ticking of a clock mechanism as the pendulum still swings forward. His legs carry him in reverse up the stairs as if he was a video rewound to watch himself ascend in an awkward fashion. He keeps an eye trained on Hannibal for the duration of his travel. Hannibal, who has silently moved to stand at the exact center of the room, remains pinned in time.

Will’s heartbeat syncs up with the swinging of the pendulum as it swing lower and lower, a reminder of their limited time. Will wonders as he reaches his intended door why the timekeeping is necessary. They make the rules here. Time is theirs to mold, a power only aided by Hannibal’s still untested strength. Suddenly, time behaves properly again. Will takes his eyes off of Hannibal for a moment, just a moment as he studies the door in front of him.

It is an unremarkable thing, flat black like the rest of his mind’s foyer and illuminated only by the amber glow of the memory set into the wall above it. Will presses one hand against the door, fingers splayed across the dark surface. He pushes, and the door moves an inch or so, but refuses to budge further. A sharp, echoing click sounds throughout the chamber and the golden orb pops neatly out of its socket and Will catches it without missing a beat. Instead of keeping it however, he lets it slide out of his hands and fall down, down, down to shatter and splinter on the floor.

The golden shards do not scatter though; they gather together in a swirling mass and grow quite large, larger than they ever should for an object so small. The mass of sparking, whirling shrapnel seems to grow and contract and spasm frightfully, but Will remains in his place. Hannibal holds his ground. Will watches as a feisty wind whips through the room, and grinds the particles into a finer sort of powder, one that crates a cloud, a fog, a mist of sorts that blankets the room. The particles turn black and nasty and vile-looking.

Will can feel them fill his lungs and they hurt, oh they sting, but it will be over soon. He can feel himself falling from his perch on high. The pendulum still swings as the particles and the wind they’e whipped up consume him. Along with his mild anxiety, Will can feel distrust, a hunter on high alert somewhere.

And suddenly, gold pinpricks begin to dot his vision. They appear random at first, but as more and more appear they begin to form a bright picture, partially obscured by mist. It’s a 3-D rendering of a scene, someplace from Will’s memory. There are people too. He and Hannibal stand in the midst of the production, a retelling of a classic tale. A tragedy.

They stand in a room the size of a small theater with heavy curtains hanging from the wall-length windows in front of them. They stand elevated it seems, viewing the scene from a distance. The dimension change is swift and disconcerting, a feeling of falling as the room materializes while they rise to view the scene.

There are bookshelves to their backs, packed with tomes upon leather-bound tomes of books and epic poems and stories bitter about being forgotten. They are preserved here. On the level below them, under the platform they stand upon are more bookshelves, hidden half in shadow and mist. There is a lounger on the far side of the room and closer to them is a desk with papers scattered neatly across it. A book sits open on it.

Paintings and sketches line the walls and this time their details are crisp and clear and clean. There are artifacts hung up in between a shelf and along one wall there is a statuette of an elk. The head has fallen to the ground somewhere. Will shudders as his silhouette moves through him, a puppet of his own recollections. Each figure, the girls and boys, Beverly, they all brush through him as if he was the ghost, the odd one out. He is.

He can feel Hannibal’s quiet like TV static buzzing, painfully slow and blank. He is willing himself into motion, into emotion, into action. But he can’t. This is Will’s mind and there are no more illusions to tear down. He will sit and watch, just as Will has for the longest time, but from a distance, from the outside. Now it’s time for both of them to look in. They will face their want and needs, their curiosities.

Hannibal and Will stand frozen in the midst of the scene and watch as it plays out, crystalizing before them in particles of amber yet still just as clear. The ladder, knocked out from underneath Will’s feet. Hannibal’s eyes, swiveling from person to person as the chill in the room grows bitter. Each swift and calculated movement,so precisely directing them towards their own doom. Will spaces out, feeling faintness creep up behind him. He can disengage as long as Hannibal stays here. Pain flairs like a strobe light in the center of his head and the projection begins to buzz like a roomful of agitated bees.

Will can feel an echo of the pain in Hannibal’s head; the man is still rooted to the spot beside him. The floor beneath them, without actually moving, shifts. There is a dizziness in the air now, the projection of events is warped somehow. Abigail rises out of the curtain’s folds again, shaking violently along with the rest of the room. The projection is falling apart. Literally.

Particles begin to clump up and fuse, falling apart in the midst of the show. But the curtain hasn’t fallen yet. The entire set turns. It falls to the side so that Hannibal and Will are forced to view the goings on as if they were lying on the floor, watching the final act. The walls fall in, fusing into unsightly collections of matter that seem more mist than solid. The room and the people within it vanish before their very eyes, disintegrating mid-motion. Dark specks begin to pop out of the scenery.

They crowd the figures and objects, they begin to eat away at the accumulating amber mist. They swirl quite fast, faster the scene vanishes and still the projection continues. Right before it’s swallowed whole by darkness, Will and Hannibal catch a glimpse of the very end of the scene.

Abigail, held flush to the front of an unrecognizable man. He looks like Hannibal at first. Of course he does. But as Will picks through the details as he did once before, he comes to the same conclusion he did then. He knows that Hannibal knows. The man now pressing the deadly curve of white to the skin of Abigail’s throat is not the man beside him. In looks and ghostly stature he may be but the impostor is just a little to angular, a little too rough around the edges. The details aren’t clean. And just like that, they are eaten up by darkness.

The memory solidifies again, back to the harmless amber orb it once was. The pendulum swings frighteningly low over their heads. Time is ticking by. Will tosses the memory upwards as if to catch it once more, but the luminescent ball slips from his fingers and into the air, flying upwards as if Will and Hannibal are standing on the ceiling and it is falling back towards the ground. Instead, the ball curves in mid-air, landing neatly back in it’s place above the door. The pendulum should brush the very tops of their heads if they spend much more time here.

Will turns to Hannibal and observes the man for a moment, considering him. He seems willing to pay the price. He did agree to it. As the pendulum, glinting maliciously, threatens to scratch the very tops of their heads, Will repeats the question he whispered into the dark of this shared plane only weeks before. 

  
  


“Why did you lie?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Who caught the pit and the pendulum reference?


	31. Beautiful and Strange, See the Colors Change Before My Eyes (pt. 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey so I wanted to start wrapping things up in this chapter. 
> 
> I wanted to.
> 
> But like
> 
> My brain said, “nah, you’re gonna write about how Hannibal’s mind moves like the rooms are set up on the teeth of gears and you can move from room to room when the gears line up right and it’s a giant clock thing and also you’re gonna spend 20 minutes researching the properties of deadly nightshade.”
> 
> And then I did.
> 
> I will do my best to finish this in the next chapter I swear-

Will closes his eyes, awaiting the inevitable impact. He breathes through it like he always does whenever it’s time to leave.

There is a mighty swing, hollow and foreboding.

A crack, a crunch of bone and a squelch of blood and entrails. 

He didn’t strictly lie , Will muses,  but he didn’t tell the entire truth either, did he?

And then Will opens his eyes to a room chilly and messy and half destroyed. Perhaps there was more of a disturbance than Will had anticipated. He realizes how tired, how worn out he is, and for once he allows himself to glance at the clock. Nearing 11:30. He’s had worse nights.

The silver and iron charms clink and spin wildly, creating a tinkling, flashy din. Will’s rapier has been lost, swept off into a corner somewhere. The box of lavender has spilled its contents across the floor. And then there is the frost. Accumulating on the ceiling and in the corners are little crystallized clumps of ice. Why is he surprised, Will wonders as his breath rises in plumes above him. The freeze is minimal, patches here and there across the room, but legitimate ice has formed near the base of the jar.

The chains are now frozen in place, adhered to each other and locked to the floor. The ice has locked the jar down too, and in the minimal space within the circle that was empty presumably minutes before, there are jagged, sparking daggers, all pointed outwards to stay any hand daring enough to approach them. They’ve materialized remarkably quickly and it would almost be comical if the rough spikes hadn’t grown over the chain loops and begun to crawl across the floorboards, a blooming collection of hard frost only inches away from where Will is kneeling on the floor.

And then a breath of fresh cold ripples across the room. Hannibal is back in his right mind again, pulling himself out of the depths Will’s head only moments after Will does. Still bound within the chain circle, Hannibal levels a stare akin to that of an enraged python, precise and without pretense. But he can’t do anything here.

Will has passed his first test. He may be the one setting this up but he has to earn what he wants, just as Hannibal does. They’ve picked each other apart, sifted through the other’s thoughts and whims and every minute emotion. They know the inner workings of the other one well, but still they do not know each other. They’ve seen grainy footage from security cameras, they’ve taken guided tours, but they haven’t actually walked down every single hall. They haven’t heard their footsteps echo up through the other’s subconscious and into their waking brain, just loud enough that the king becomes aware of an intruder in the castle. Well, it’s about time the stowaway makes themselves known. The king has expected him for a long, long time now, and

_I suppose it is time for us to meet. Face to face._

“So it is.”

Hannibal stares at Will, those pinprick pupils precise enough to fire an arrow and split it with the next shot. His eyes are the only crack in the leviathan wall, two impact points that held up just enough. But not quite. Something made it through.  As Will stares back at Hannibal, he wonders if maybe it was he who snuck into Pygmalion’s workshop late in the night. Maybe it was he who defaced his work. Perhaps he’d only finished the second half of the job. 

Will stares back at Hannibal, eyes wide open like stained glass windows, eyes screwed shut like the doors that wouldn’t open. He shuts the entrance doors, heavy though they are and pats each of his dogs on their colossal heads. Will does not deadbolt the door. Hannibal, he knows without actually knowing, is a man of his word.

Once again, he traverses multitudes, all wrought and bent and twisted into a baroque or Romanesque or renaissance style depending where you were in the heavens. The Milky Way makes up the floor and columns decorated with varicolored sparking space dust spiral upwards and bloom across the ceiling, an expansive, arching thing that seems to arc on forever. The architecture makes no sense, but then again, it doesn’t have too. Hallways double back on themselves and rooms duplicate, only they’re copied twice as large.

The columns are crowned with planetary rings, bright and almost pixilated in appearance. The walls are adorned with stars concealing tragedies and supernovas of comedies, composure exploding, loosing it at their own wit. Memories are woven into the ones placed farthest away, hung from the firmament ceiling in patters that match the night sky.

Will wonders if the scenery changes as the years go by, as the season pass. He knows the night sky well enough to safely navigate, but something is off here. This isn’t the sky he knows. Perhaps Hannibal Lecter’s sky is something from a place he does not know. A different hemisphere, a different season, perhaps?

Will considers brushing up on his celestial navigation as he steps lightly through what he suspects is Lecter’s courtyard of stars, lightly being the operative word. Everything seems to take just a little bit less effort here, easier to breathe, easier to walk, just light enough to touch the planets that light the place, hanging like luminous, strangely succulent fruit. Like the pomegranates, the promise of sated hunger only to be met with a cavity, and empty space filling you up with starvation. Will continues on.

Stars seem togrow here like it’s a garden, ripe red giants swollen and falling from the vine while bush nebulae still haven’t matured properly. Will steps carefully around space dust creepers and myths written into the sky, marveling at the asteroid belt tile on the floor. He loses himself, far more than he did previously. Back then, the lights of Hannibal’s eyes were distant points of light, stars to weak or far away to be noticed. But there is a compass next to Will’s heart and he can feel the pull of north in his chest. He follows it without question.

And there—there it is, in all of it’s beautiful, wrecked glory. The courtyard building expands suddenly as Will rounds a corner in the wicked structure. Arches made of moons bound by the gravitational pull of a planet as the centerpiece curl upwards and meet in the middle. The asteroid belt tile has been replaced with Milky Way path again, fanning outwards in elaborate twists and curls.

The planet centerpiece resembles a fountain of sorts Will decides as he pads quietly through the scene, drinking in each magnificent detail. It looks like a gas giant cracked open like an egg—the wispy bright blue streaks of gas and finely ground matter gradually progressing to gases compressed into liquids that float aimlessly around it and finally to a vaguely solid core, making up the decoration’s base. The liquid shines brightly the the dim, varied light of the stars. The rings around the planet fountain spin lazily, but the wall behind this planetary mess proves far more interesting.

Standing somewhat behind this display are two sphinxes, the only things that seem to be out of place. They feel more solid than the rest of the structure, more substance than the vague outlines and shapes. Their eyes are  _eyes_ , not distant stars that have fallen into place. They judge Will as he walks past. Their eyes move. Nothing happens for a very, very long time. He steps forward.

Creepers sprouting the corpses of stars crawl up the damaged craters, growing into the cracks and crevices and filling in the gaps, carefully holding the wall together. The impacts in the wall are massive things up close as all stars are apt to be, but the holes from which they glow are rather small. The glow they produce is also a surprise in and of itself in that it is not blindingly bright. It casts a proper ambient light over everything, still remaining bright at it’s center somehow without actually illuminating anything.

It’s oddly heavy, but easy on the eyes, sweet like honey. Bees. The duality of his predicament. Will considers these things as he approaches the cavities. He carefully picks his way through the debris, head held high. Running a hand through the cracks in the wall, he notices that the dying stars glow faintly blue the closer to the light they get. These cavities, these punctures in the neat design, these  variables  are from where life springs here.

Will pauses, the first true inkling of caution he’s felt tonight. What exactly is he supposed to do? He has a thought or two, a hypothesis, a half-formed idea. Those seem to have worked fairly well up until this point. He’s had a goal, a problem, and a vague idea of how to get there. It’s terrible logic, but that doesn’t hold a candle to what he’s doing now.

Will stands in front of these dark barriers, tracing the cracks that run deep, deeper into the surface of space. His arms aren’t wide enoughto run his hands across both craters and so he lists to the right, pushing gently at the crumbling wall. The material becomes pliant beneath his fingers. Slowly, gently, with as much care as he can, Will begins to pick away at the wall, bit by bit, grain by grain. He pulls and pokes and prods here and there, testing each and every crack and crevice for weaknesses until the wall begins to fall in on its own. The light grows brighter, spilling gently over everything. The walls begin to shake as Will pulls at them with more ferocity, digging in earnest now. 

A flash blinds him.

A ear-splitting impact deafens him. 

And as Will coughs and splutters and rubs space and dust and matter from his eyes, he breathes a little easier. He looks up to admire his work. The right cavity has been broken open. Picking lightly through the debris, Will climbs as best he can into the sparking, overpowering light. He can only feel his way now for fear of blinding himself, but is does him little good as he feels the ground slip out from underneath him. He hits the floor.

There’s floor here, wherever he is. It’s smooth like fancy tile and pleasantly warm, bathed in golden sunshine. Then there is sunshine as well, contrast between darkness and light...

Will opens his eyes and scrambles to his feet greeted by high, arching ceilings and windows that casts spotlights of gold. The chapel is no less radiant than when he first glimpsed it. Up the long, staggered steps Will goes, past the pillars, past the windows, past the figures on the walls that watch him pass with interest. Past the candlesticks and the dividers and the benches never sat on but still worn down.

Hannibal stands near the chapel’s end, back to the rest of the building, staring at nothing above him. Will’s feet don’t make a sound as he traipses up the many steps. Hannibal turns to him. He supposes this is what the man must have looked like in life. He isn’t very different from when Will first saw him, still admirably dressed and regal, still in a suit. His hair is still combed evenly back, his posture is still immaculate. But in deathWill never got to see his eyes.

In whatever this projection of life is, they are critical, curious things, searching and scanning for answers, whatever he may seek, analytical without a cold edge. Will suspect, if he desired, that absent cold could make itself known and would freeze someone where they stood. The look he bends upon Will is not like that, not today.

It is, after much thought, melancholic, layered gently with politeness and a certain esteemed presentableness. It is a distaste for what will come, while knowing that this is an exchange that must be made. Hannibal permits Will to drink him in a little longer before smiling gently, the kind of polite lip-grin that you learn to use as a default.

His is somewhat personalized though, it comes with the rest of his face. Those looks don’t normally reach your eyes. With the same sort of grace and efficiency he embodies in death, Hannibal Lecter turns on his heel and makes his way towards a door tucked away in a quiet corner of the hall. He steps aside, expectant. Will gives him a quizzical look; he hasn’t even opened it yet.

”There are places here that I cannot go, at least not alone, and places I cannot visit at all.”

Somewhere within Will’s awareness of this place, whatever it is, he feels something begin to move.

Will falls inexorably into step behind Hannibal passing through the doorway without a second thought. The floor beneath him falls into place. Not like it’s materialized, more like the feeling just before the elevator doors open, that uncomfortable settling feeling, like the floor is locking itself into place.  


“And the bricks move again...”

“Only out of convenience. It would be terribly impolite of me to make you walk for as long as we would have.”

Will catches a chill in his voice, the melancholy he’d seen behind his eyes. It was so cleverly disguised, defused across his body in a sheen, almost concealed by that perfectly stitched and tailored composure Will has grown so used to from him.  _A person suit._ He holds down a snort, hoping Hannibal might not notice. He does.

“I knew someone who referred to me as such.”

Hannibal shivers a little, though there isn’t very much cold to be felt here. There isn’t much to be felt at all. Will begins to take in the scene. At first glance he wonders if he’s back home in Wolf Trap, deep in the forest, but no, there’s no snow on the ground here. The trees are thin, sinewy, and bare of leaves but plentiful. Their branches curl into claws, fallen limbs sometimes scratch at you as you pass.

The forest floor is not blanketed in leaves per se, but there is a considerable amount of debris here. They make no sound as they walk across them. A heavy mist blankets their surroundings and as Hannibal takes the lead, and Will, against his better judgement, begins to wonder where they might be going. What places within Hannibal’s own memory can he no longer visit? Will knows that feeling.

But he’s kept those particular doors out of sight and out of mind for a very, very long time, positioned frighteningly far up the walls of his foyer, concealed by distance and shadows. The spiral staircase that moves upwards across the walls does seem to go on forever. Will wonders if that’s what the hallways of Hannibal’s mind are like. Doubling back on themselves, looping around, staircases unraveling themselves like snakes only to reconstruct themselves again while you hold desperately onto them. And all the while the bricks move.

Out of sheer habit, Will picks his way carefully through the undergrowth, far more tentative than Hannibal who follows the same graceful, measured stride, but with more speed, more urgency. For the first time, Will suspects something is off with the doctor. Visually, something is amiss, he just can’t put his finger on what, like something is slightly out of alignment. Perhaps that’s what he meant when he said there were places he couldn’t visit. Hannibal is walking normally Will supposes; he’s only ever seem Hannibal walk a handful of times. He doesn’t look injured, his posture is impeccable as always. He still exudes that cool calm, as though his very presence in a room would lower the temperature, a commanding, but not harsh force. He looks pale in the lack of light.

The mist begins to thin and Will can see farther around him. The blurriness of his surroundings unsettles him. Anything too far in the middle distance becomes smudged. Perhaps things live out here, perhaps they defend whatever Hannibal has kept himself from encountering. As the mist thins, the trees do as well and suddenly Will is looking up.

Set against fierce grey sky, cutting sharply upwards from the earth is it built upon is a towering, turret-laden castle. It is a magnificent, terrible beast, just like the man in who’s mind it resides, tower tops dark as winter nights in Wolf Trap forests and stonework grey and steely as thunderclouds that climb high into the heavens, daring to be dispersed by wind.

It looks like a long-slumbering giant, hibernating for so long that the very ground began to envelop it. A mountain creeped up it’s back, molding around the curve of the spine and shoulder blades. Dirt accumulated in the fissures and crevices, filling in the gaps. Moss and grass and sleeping nightshade stuffed the pillow under the giant’s head. The ground began to part for it, creating a perfectly molded cavity for it’s body. And as it breathed in the cold and the wet and the nightshade plants, delirium began to set in. It only takes a handful of berries and they are ever so sweet.

And now the giant sleeps. The castle is it’s shell and the earth is it’s blanket, and it slumbers somewhere in between them. It has curled up like a sleeping child, bending into itself to shelter what hides in the belly of the beast. An empty, airless cavity, a place that wind blows through and doesn’t bother to stay behind in. Will has a terrible feeling that the stars he saw are positioned just above him in the sky, concealed by fading daylight. 

“Castle Lecter,”

Hannibal says, and Will can hear something very, very clearly in his voice that he just can’t name.

“My home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably the longest thing I’ve written for a chapter


	32. The Fourth Tale

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Shameless Inception reference.

The air here is damp and heavy, muting any sound. There is a strangely sweet decay, happening all over, but no sign of anything decaying. Still the fetor smell remains. The ground is mildly pliant and wet, and for the first time Will realizes that Hannibal leaves no tracks, no footprints of any kind. He walked, or he appears to, but he doesn’t struggle to keep his feet from sinking into the earth like Will does on occasion. There isn’t even mud on his shoes, no traces of moisture on his pant legs, but Will’s legs are stained heavily with dirt. Perhaps that is what’s out of place? Well, it is, but there is still something else off. 

The outer stonework of the castle has moss growing in the cracks, softening the edges just a bit. It’s wet like it’s been raining recently, but there was no evidence of rain the the forest. Cautiously, Will steps as quickly as he can after Hannibal towards the monstrous doors of the castle, finding himself short of breath as he catches up. Hannibal does not appear to have suffered any such hindrance throughout their journey. His hair is still neatly in place, his suit is unruffled by their small hike and his shoes and pant legs are still miraculously clean. He doesn’t seem out of breath at all. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, in fact.

Hannibal appears to catch this epiphany as if it is a bird that Will has released, leaping out of his hands and into the sky, visible to all. Will can see it in the very slight turn of his head, as if to spot something clearer out of the corner of his eye. He chooses not to comment. There is a split-second hesitation in the way he reaches for the door, unnoticeable if you weren’t really paying attention, but Will is unnerved by this off-ness in the doctor. He’s unwilling to let the man leave his sight.

Hannibal, with what seems to be very little effort for a door so large, pushes against it. The doors swing forward with the first substantially loud sound Will’s heard here: an ear-splitting creak—old, rusty, hinges in need of care. There is the sigh of the door’s wood, the odd softness in the texture of the planks from age and wear and water. They swing forward into darkness. Hannibal pauses before stepping over the threshold, before he makes his move. Will watches as the line of his shoulder tenses, as if he’s repressing pain. He’s still very pale in the washed-out daylight. As soon as Hannibal takes a step into the room, candles burst into life, illuminating the scenery.

The foyer is immeasurably vast, reaching back into the ancient building. Will suspects it takes up only a fraction of the actual foundation. The first thing he sees is a staircase. It’s nothing short of gigantic. Heavy-set and sprawling, it begins on the left side of the foyer, right in front of a doorway leading off into the house. It hugs the wall closely, stopping once it reaches the center of the back wall for a landing to lead further into the house before continuing up the walls for another story or so.

Arches and decorative overhangs on the landings accent the stairs, handing from it’s underside and sprouting from the walls. Their complex and arching designs create an unsettling atmosphere, concealing any threat with darkness and complex patterns. Will catches a glimpse of other rooms beyond the landings. Some are lit by lamps and fireplaces, others remain dark. The balustrade is just as complex, carved reverently of the same dark wood as the staircase is constructed of. It’s awe-inspiring yet pretentious, very gothic is style. Very different from Hannibal’s choice of architecture.

The wallpaper color is indistinguishable in the half-light, but the walls are littered with unidentifiable portraits, intricate wallpaper patterns, and so on. It seems somewhat younger that the rest of the place, as if the building had been updated instead of rebuilt.

Underneath the first landing is a wide, gaping doorway, hanging open like a mouth leading into the throat of the house: a ballroom, perhaps? The space is wide and open from what Will can see from here and lit by a roaring fireplace. Strangely, the light and warmth of the fire does not travel, it does not glint off of the floorboards, their indiscriminate patters lost to darkness and the strange behaviors of light.

There are windows set into the highest walls, light shining through them and catching dust, throwing everything below them into merciful relief—and still there is a disturbing absence in the saturation of color. Everything seems muted, even the carpet leading up the staircase. The color has been drained by age leaving the marvels of a once-warm room to fade away, to be sapped of it’s vibrancy by sunlight if it had any. It reminds him of Hannibal. 

As Will steps up beside him, he notices the lines and the shadows on his face have grown sharp when thrown into watery relief. He is most definitely paler. Hannibal does not look at him, instead choosing to stare upwards, eyes trailing along the staircase and banister. Casting his gaze around the room, Hannibal makes his quiet way to the right, away from the staircase and into one of the darker rooms.

Somehow, it lights by itself, as though being revealed like the map in a game through fog as you got closer. This one is smaller than the last, but just as foreboding and unsettling. Furnishings made of shadows decorate the rooms they pass and arches line the hallways, separating each door they walk by. Will can definitely pick out the misnomers in the environment as they continue to lose themselves in the belly of the house.

Hannibal’s suit, so cleanly cut and tailored seems to loosen awkwardly around his shoulders and the sleeves sneak down his wrists. His skin grows paler and thinner. His spine seems to sag and Will swears his fingers grow more spindly and spider-like as the minutes go by. Past portrait and wall paper and lightless window they go, and at each opportunity he gets, whenever there is just enough light, Will gives Hannibal’s back a silent once-over, an inspection of the subtle changes since last he bothered to check.

Each time, something seems a little more off, a little more out of alignment than the last. Will quietly fears he might give himself away if he keeps this up, but at each window they pass Hannibal appears in even worse and more sickly condition. The castle seems to sag with him, the out-of place wood of the floorboards moaning out of tune if they make a misstep and stone of some of the walls appearing as though it might crumble away if touched. As they venture deeper into the bowels of the castle, he begins to truly worry. 

Will taps out rather quickly and against his better judgement as well, so he can’t quite tell how much time (does time even operate here?) they’ve spent in this place. Perhaps Hannibal can’t move the hallways around here. Perhaps it has something to do with his inability to visit some areas. Perhaps this is one. He’s deteriorating, collapsing in on himself with drastic results. He doesn’t look human anymore, and part of Will is apprehensive to look at his face. He wonders if is eyes have been broken open.

And then Hannibal stops.

Will nearly runs into him, pulling up short as he realizes they’re at the end of a short but broad hallway, standing in front at a set of large, impossibly old doors. They look like they’ve been here since before the existence of the castle, a glitch in reality that allowed their presence and wasn’t patched before the construction of this stone Goliath. And they were permitted to remain.

A sigh unlike anything Will has heard before shakes Hannibal’s frame like he’s a dried cornstalk fluttering in heavy winter wind, threatening to crumble away before Will’s very eyes. It’s a wheezy sound, breathless and raspy, a sound only found in the depths of a winter-ravaged forest from a person beaten by the cold and hunger hanging desperately onto their last seconds of life. It rattles through the man’s rib cage like it’s an empty space.

He also notices with growing alarm that though Hannibal’s spine is now subtly visible through his suit and has curved forward drastically, the man hasn’t gotten much shorter. His hair has grown disheveled and when he lifts his hand to push open the door, Will sees it shake as though the he’s aged decades since they began this hellish walk. Bones and tendons clearly show through the papery, mottled skin, blackened by-wait, blackened? That can’t be, the temperature in here is no where near cold enough to cause frostbite. And still Hannibal’s fingers have gone black and shaky.

As he splays his fingers against the door, Will can see the effort it takes him to open it; the action causes him physical pain. Will averts his eyes, knowing full well that Hannibal, already visibly weakened by this journey will not be able to enter.  _There are places here that I cannot go, at least not alone, and places I cannot visit at all._ He keeps his eyes fixed on his feet, unwilling to look at what lays before him or what stands next to him. Will steps confidently over the threshold, not a trace of hesitance or apprehension on his face. He’s a trained field agent after all. 

For a moment after the door shuts, Will wonders if he’s been swallowed by Hannibal’s mind, wrapped tightly in darkness and dropped down his throat, a feast to fuel him. But not for long, and soon the room materializes like the landscape of a game. It is nothing short of majestic.

Like the scene of Wonderland chaos right out of Will’s dream, this place holds the same majesty, the same uncomfortable sense of creeping horror so beautifully arranged. It’s not an overly large room, not too showy, not too pretentious. The windows are positioned against the opposite wall to where Will is standing. But  however towering, however wide and bright and open they are, they don’t illuminate the room in the way they should; instead there’s a wash of watery light that doesn’t really reach anything, unwilling, it seems, to enter further into the house.

The curtains that cover them are heavy, but they’e pulled back to their fullest extent and still there just isn’t enough light. It still washes some of the color from the room; the rug and the walls are draining of color as Will takes all of it in. Bookshelves line the walls and a mezzanine starting on the short wall to Will’s right and extending along the wall to his back has been constructed to reach the highest shelves, hidden out of sight by reluctant light and eager shadows.

There are still more indiscriminate paintings hanging where there aren’t books, and Will begins to wonder how many artworks could live in one castle.To Will’s left is a convex fireplace molded against the wall, protruding slightly only to level off again into more shelves. The great isn’t lit despite the darkness, but then again, who would need it?

There is no one here. 

In the far corner of the room is a collection of furniture: a couple of chairs, a sofa, the like. They’re positioned artfully around a parlor grand, somehow the brightest thing in the room. It’s color, the way the light bounces off of it draw Will’s eyes like a corpse, like body horror in a film. Not quite upsetting enough that you have to look away but unsettling enough to keep you there.

The legs are impossibly detailed, curling, winding things that still look sturdy. They are. They look more wrought than carved. The body of the instrument glows, radiating echos of joy, of memories now turned sour. We can recall when they were unimaginably sweet. We gorged ourselves on them, didn’t we? We thought they would last forever.

The lid is propped open, ready and waiting for a concert or visitors, or for someone to tap out a simple melody. The seat is remarkably intact given the perceived age. Everything about it is grace and majesty. The damn thing practically glows. The contours of the wood are elegant enough to distract from the suspicious nature of the lighting and color, but not quite enough to obliterate it. Whatever is attached to it. Because there is no question about that.

There is, in fact, someone here. 

The piano is not waiting for someone, for there are already people there. Two figures sit on the bench. One, a man. A man who’s mind contains multitudes, who lives in poetry and culture and exploration. He is vivid and lively, a sentiment expressed only by his eyes. They twinkle merrily as he guides the hands of his companion across the keys and Will swears he’s heard the tune before.

He is the personification of the piano’s elegance, the man who could have this house, this perfect, cultured life and only wish for this scene to be his existence. His companion contrasts him.

Her complexion is only accentuated by the dim light and the contrast with the piano’s glow, the comparison of her hair and her face only made clearer. Her fingers are remarkably dextrose—she’s been practicing, and eagerly at that, she’s excited. Her face is a quiet one, a face full of stars concealed by the pale daytime sky.

Her eyes are bright, they shine with concentration and her brow screws just a little as she hits a difficult chord. The harmony rings strong throughout the room, echoing forward into the present, back to Will. He stares and stares and stares, entirely unable to look away from the scene playing out in front of his eyes.

Is this the horror Hannibal felt, pinned down by an unknown force, unable to focus on anything other than his meeting with with played through the other’s eyes? But this, this is happy. Unlike Will’s recollections, so often marred by unpleasantness and trauma, this is joyous in a quiet way.

Until the chords turn sour and the air adopts a minor key. And then Hannibal is aware. He was aware previously, this memory-projection of him, but now he focuses on Will fully, digesting this rude awakening. Perhaps is the change in lighting; the last of the color is sapped from the piano, drawn outside and away, escaping the confines of these cursed walls. The instrument appears to sag as that happens, becoming dreary and heavy and dead, blending in with the rest of the scenery.

Perhaps it is Will’s awareness of the song, the plinking sound of piano keys that alerts Hannibal’s projection to his presence. Perhaps he somehow figured out that someone was eavesdropping.

If anything is the signifier though, it’s Abigail.

  
She, like the piano, begins to sag under her own weight, falling apart at the seams. She crashes and burns and her strings begin to coil with the heat. They snap. Her lid falls closed and he legs give out and her keys make discordant, ugly sounds. Her front is soaked with whatever is left inside her hollow, burning body. Whatever fills the empty space.

And suddenly she is very, very pale. 

And suddenly there is a full moon in her face.

And the craters on it have shrunk to freckles, stars spattered across her face.

And suddenly there is a new moon in her hair, flat, all-consuming black. 

And she withers away. Like whenever happened to Hannibal during their journey her face begins to tighten and pull and fold in on itself, her skin hugs her spindly bones, hollowing out her features. Abigail’s fingers are barely skin anymore and her clothes hand loosely off of her body.

Her eyes sink deeper and deeper into her skull until they are gobbled up by sharp, unforgiving shadows and her ribs poke aggressively through her shirt. She curls into herself, as though compacting herself might prevent her being blown away by a simple breath of wind. Perhaps that why Will has temporarily forgotten to breathe. Her spine juts up through her back and she crumbles, folding in two and disintegrating before Will’s very eyes.

She is nothing more than bone. 

Will looks on for a long, long time before Hannibal catches his eye, and the rude awakening has been processed. They share a glance longer than Will stared openly at the remnants of a girl, perhaps willing her back into existence. His eyes do begin to sink back into his head, just a little bit, and the bones of his skull protrude sharply from his face. His fingers look a little spindler and he hunches just a bit and his ribs are ever so slightly visible through his shirt. But he does not wither away or waste. He simply stands there, a hole in his perfect fortress, unable to be patched or mended.

Will turns his back on the room as it dims and darkens past recognition. The door swings open.

And he’s back in the hallway, the wide, empty intestine of the giant comfortably coiled in its belly. Hannibal waits for him outside, side-lit by a nearby window. The light travels just far enough. Will wonders if what he sees is what the projection would have eventually become. 

Hannibal is bent nearly in half, his spine curled over and jutting painfully out of his back. Still he towers over Will, impossibly large for someone so emaciated. His ribs clearly show through his chest, each ridge with it’s own shadow without highlights, barely covered by frighteningly thin, dark skin. It appears to absorb any and all light that touches it, rendering light sections all but the same color as the shadows, barely discernible.

For a moment, Will is unsure if it’s just a rib cage and head floating loose in the air, but no, the skin pulls inwards as the ribs drop off. Hannibal’s belly is entirely shadow, a concave structure that almost touches his spine. At this point Will notices that part of the reason Hannibal looms so large is the fact that he’s wearing a lengthy, dark robe, trailing far behind him. Will can’t quite pick out the material, only that it spills over Hannibal like water, but it refuses to shine in the light.

The only real reason Will noticed it was because there was no way his hands—so spidery and spindly-fingered and sharp—could attach to arms with such an odd shape, such breadth. The material coils and collects like heavy smoke, thriving best it seems in darkness. Because of the way the robe falls, Will takes notice of the awkwardness of Hannibal’s legs. Are they broken somehow?

They look uncharacteristically muscular for such an withered, skeletal body to sit atop them but the oddities don’t stop there. They’re shaped like an elk or a wolf’s hindquarters, allowing Hannibal a more stooped appearance while still towering unnaturally high. From what would be his knees down everything is in such all-consuming a shadow that Will cannot see anything more accept for hints at the silky material.

It gives the impression that his shoulders are wider than they are, all thin skin and bones with so little mass. He still radiates majesty though, the antlers curling upwards from his bald head make him look even more nightmarish than he already is. They add width to his head, all prongs and points and branches keeping with the theme. His face betrays no thought or emotion, no expression at all. Both eyes are intact and blank, just sheets of white where pupils should be. Will has seen this man before; he did not recognize him then.  _ Someone from a half-remembered dream... _

_ I did not lie to you, Will _ ,  Hannibal whispers, wearing the Stag King’s skin. Or perhaps that is who he is. 

“You told fragments of the truth.”

_ I gave you half-truths. Just enough so as to whet your appetite. _

And very suddenly Will has so, so many questions for him, and there would never be enough answers. But there is not time for that now. 

Will watches the pendulum fall, the house and the giant wake up, the chapel’s ceiling fall in. And Hannibal’s eyes begin to fall apart, reducing them for a second or so to what Will knew them to be: holes blasted clean through into his mind, his weakness in an otherwise perfect fortress. His antlers explode into flames, greedily licking up everything around him.

Will opens his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As a side note, the foyer for the castle was based on what I imagined as larger, more elegant version of the foyer of Allerdale Hall from Crimson Peak.


	33. Beautiful and Strange, See the Colors Change Before My Eyes (pt. 2)

Will opens his eyes.

He opens them to a room still frost-covered, still messy and torn partially apart by wind and the rage of a man bitter not about his death, but because he lived past it. A man trapped. Will, after taking a moment to collect himself, realizes that he can empathize with this, whether he likes it or not. One of this man’s many, varied goals makes sense to him; why wouldn’t it? Is it so wrong to ask for the chance to run before the gunshot of the start, for a ten-second advantage in the chase of predator versus prey where the roles are switched again and again?

Hannibal appears hazy before him before his lines come back into focus. Perhaps that’s his pendulum? He shakes like wind chimes in a breeze, limbs a little thinner, face a little sharper. His eyes appear blasted open again, only this time the right one, the one Will broke open has sustained more damage. Pieces of skin float around the impact point like shards of brick and mortar from a damaged wall and it makes his face seem a tad off-kilter.

The spots of light, the pinpricks that are his eyes shine still brighter, and though they betray little emotion, Will picks something out of the wreckage. After a few minutes of thought and trying to identify his find, he settles on heartbreak, because what else could this be? This man has been given nothing but black eyes from his past, not broken by it, but beaten. He took that and made it into a weapon, his heartbreak. He got back at it. He realized its power, and then he grew a taste for it.

An ugly, repulsive taste for ugly, repulsive people, but ugly, repulsive people often stand on a spectrum. For all his psychiatry and his expertise in his field, there was no spectrum here. Pigs marked for it will go to slaughter. He hand-picked them with his personalized weapon, he sliced them, diced them, propped and posed them. They were to be bettered by him in death as they could not be in life, for people are stubborn, complicated creatures.

Will realizes all of this, all at once, without having a solid spot to jump from in his logical leaps. From the snippets he seenand the fragments he’s heard and the fractions of emotions he’s caught like fish he can not only deduce these things, but know them to be true. He wonders for all of Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s prowess, all he has learned and observed form his patients, how he can so readily cast aside those who he sees as unfit. Deny them their humanity as they die and bring it back to them in death. In art. Seems like a bit of a snap judgement. Will decides that, in some twisted, hellish way, he can respect it, the art, but not the medium. He’s never been a fan of sculpture. Perhaps that’s why he broke into Pygmalion’s workshop.

Will gathers the last of his surprisingly depleted strength and stands, feeling stupid for not fully realizing the impact of  invading the mind of a ghost . Muddy, multicolored stars pop out over his vision and he sways slightly. He presses his eyes closed, waiting for his blood flow to adjust. The silence here in uncomfortable to say the least. Will has a myriad of questions to ask, but somehow he feels as though it’s not the right time. There’s no real way to compare it to anything, it’s not exactly relatable to have held a full conversation with a Visitor, period.

Will takes some time to watch Hannibal like how one might view a sleeping tiger, observing the man for however long he must. He doesn’t bother to check the clock; it’s late, why must he know anything more? Keeping one eye glued to the half-frozen chain circle, Will begins to tidy the room. So strange that this is his place of respite, his shelter and he lets this man of all people in. His chaos and disruption in Will’s fragile, perfect maze.

He plucks the silver charms and trinkets from the walls. He removes necklace but not the bracelets, he’s decided to save those. He fetches a broom from the kitchen, only slightly hampered by his dogs, whining and tripping over his feet and theirs in an attempt to keep as close a watch on him as they can. Poor things. They’re only doing what they know is best, keeping away whatever comes crawling in the night.

Hannibal has, partially because he has very few options, remained confined to his circle of chains, still as coldly melancholy as ever. Will chooses to go after the fallen box of lavender, feeling monumentally awkward. There is no handbook for how to act in this kind of situation, the cleanup of a confessional with a ghost. Hannibal does not appear to be bothered by it though, instead choosing to stare blankly off into the middle distance, eyes wide and uneven.

He looks strangely more statuesque this way, like those figures missing arms or heads. They haven’t quite stood the test of time, the roar of the fire and wind and rain. He clean up the last of the lavender, realizing that if he is to sweep the salt as well, he will have to interact with Hannibal. Will again wises up to the idea that he should have though this through better.

But then again, a soldier going into battle can’t simply expect to be stabbed in the face in the midst of a fight. That’s not exactly the attitude that’s applauded. As quietly as he can, Will props the broom against the wall and approaches the circle of chains. The air grows nervous again, thin and agitated. Hannibal comes out of his reverie. He regards Will with a look like weathered stone.

Will supposes the cleanup can be saved for later. They do have catching up to do.

He approaches the frozen chain circle, shedding the caution he had before. Hannibal, pauses mid-motion, hesitant in his new vulnerability. Will knows full well that what he’s just asked of Hannibal is the equivalent of figuratively skinning him. Currently, he’s raw and in pain, still reeling from his experiences. Will can empathize with that. Being skinned alive.

It’s a feeling that dulls overtime, reviewing memory after memory. It’s disarming. He’s unsurprised when neither of them make a move. He wonders if Hannibal thinks if he complies, Will might dump him into the hands of a disposal company, leave him to be incinerated, or worse abandon him for the FBPI. He wonders about his own power.

Hannibal, after a few moments of hesitation, concedes. He begins to unravel. He appears to melt and smudge like wax in the sun, loosing proportion quite quickly. His bones loose their rigidity and his limbs sag, his face breaks and he begins to unwind like a tightly coiled roll of paper. The ectoplasm is diluting. He looses a finger in the process, the appendage detaching and floating like jelly in mid-air. Then a foot goes as well. A hand falls away, breaking down into nothingness.

It’s a slow motion reenactment of what happened at the pool. His body collapses, appearing like chopped-up jello, gelatinous and easy to pick apart, looking as though slashed by a sword repeatedly. Before he vanishes completely, he looks in a bad way: sagging under his own weight, crumpling, chopped to pieces through his torso. He comes undone.

Hannibal breaks down and fades and smudges, the globs of ectoplasm growing heavy, sinking back into the silver-glass jar. One by one each piece and particle of ooze is replaced in the jar, sparking like fairly lights. Some of the cold and the fog in the room is drawn in with it, swirling viciously around the circle before seeping into the floorboards as the last drop of ectoplasm splashes into the jar.

It’s full to the brim, burning with bright blue light swirling in an hombre of the same color, separated into streaks. If Will ever dared to touch the substance, if it were to not harm him in some way, he’d surely stir the jar’s contents just to watch the coils of light mix in with the varying shades of blue. Maybe watch the liquid-gas substance drip from his fingers if he could, captivated by the luminous nature of it.

The jar shines brighter now that it’s occupant is settled back inside it, the odd lighting sending obscure patters spinning across the walls. Will dares, though he cannot touch the alluring substance without fear of terrible harm, to inch closer, to stick his head across the barrier and to get a good look at it.

He sits there, bent half-way over the chain line, melting ice turned to water dripping onto him, staring mesmerized at this glimmering light show stretched across his walls. Will does not know for how long he admires it, ponders the cruelty and the wonder of the man inside it. Beautiful and strange though it is, however captivating watching it may be, Will does not want to waste anymore time. Still, he can’t help watching the colors change for just a while longer.

He gently shuts the lid, turning the knobs closed.

It’s time for a very long walk.

  
———————

Will check his window and checks it again, indecisive on what to wear outside. In the end he decides on a snow suit given the depth of the downfall out there. It feels odd, so late at night, so hopped up on adrenaline and still so very, very tired. He takes a hat, heavy-duty gloves, and hand warmers, then takes an extra pair for his boots. Will floats around his house for a good twenty minutes before fetching a flashlight and a shovel. It will be a very long walk indeed.

He’ll be out in the cold for a while considering the time of year, but he goes to retrieve the jar. The ice has largely melted away and it’s fairly easy to pull the jar from the soggy mess of chains. Will dries it with his coat before tucking it snugly under his arm and tossing the shovel over his shoulder, picking through the moving mass of dogs crowding his feet. They’re just doing their job, aren’t they? They don’t know any better.

Aside from the danger of stepping on one of their many feet, Will finds a bit of peace as he squeezes through the door to avoid letting any of his pack follow him into the night. The cold does not grant him any less harsh a punishment as he steps carefully off of his porch, already missing the warmth of his house.

The snow has let up a bit since Will was last outside, but it doesn’t make his vision or his path much clearer. He takes a turn he wouldn’t normally make, directing his path towards the surrounding forest, trudging through the untouched, slowly deepening snow. Snow, unlike other weather conditions, comes with white noise, the background hum that ensures your perceived safety. You’ll hear something coming if it is. It’s comforting despite its unforgiving nature. It also makes everything harder to see.

Will slips twice on his way up the slight incline leading into the forest and nearly breaks his ankle stumbling into the forest and under the cover of the trees. They’re bare at this point seeing as it’s winter but they provide some respite from the snowfall. Carefully, he passes his shovel into the hand that’s helping support the jar to reach for his flashlight; the moon is only so bright.

But before he even touches his pocket, Will is nearly blinded by a flare of blue light. His first instinct is the cops, but he realizes that the direction is all wrong. The ectoplasm burns brightly in the night and the snowfall, bathing their surroundings in light. It works better than any flashlight would. Will can only smile. He repositions the jar under his arm seeing as its weight distribution is getting uncomfortable and props the shovel on his shoulder again, shuffling sluggishly through the snow.

Will does walk for a very lengthy amount of time, his only source of light a dead man in a jar. Such a ludicrous thing. But he walks. And walks. And walks. He walks straight into the woods until he can’t see his house anymore and then he walks further. He’s lucky it’s snowing. Will walks until he is sure he’d have gotten lost and died out here of it weren’t for his tracks. Only when he is sure of this does he stop.

Bone-tired and breathless, it’s now Will’s turn to wheeze like a man hanging by his fingernails over the chasm Hades opened up for Persephone. He breathes like a dying man. Dropping the jar rather unceremoniously into the snow, Will collapses, pressing his mercifully warm hands to his face. He sits there until he can control his breathing again. He never considers if it was a bad idea. Time favors no one. He sits in thought.

For once his mind is not drifting among the stars, for once he can follow a train of thought. Getting up, moving, shoveling the partially frozen earth will not fail to warm him up. Hannibal is still providing him with ample light. But he does not want to dig alone. Reaching over to the jar, Will twists open the nearest knob without hesitation. A sigh fills the still air.

Will picks up the shovel and begins to dig into the still-fluffy snow, finding the light nature of it irritating. It’s a weak teaser for what’s to come. After less than a minute of digging, he hits partially frozen ground. This is still Wolf Trap, Virginia, Will remembers—snow can accumulate overnight in large drifts but that doesn’t mean it won’t melt during the day. The ground won’t be as frozen as he’d initially thought.

The earth isn’t as pliant as he’d like and the wind still bites at his exposed face, threatening frostbite. Still, Will picks away at the ground, only later—as you are apt to notice when it happens—that he’s tuning out to the world around him. Soon the cold is a distant memory, like he’s running a hand over a nasty scar or burn.

He’s watching his actions through a glass barrier placed in front of his eyes, aware of the sear in his arms and legs as he refuses to let up his relentless digging but glassy-eyed and detached as well. He feels if from someone else’s body, somewhere else. An extra push into the ground as he goes back to his surprisingly substantial hole startles him. He nearly pitches forward into the snow.

Will glances over at the jar, noticing that the previously lazy swirling of the ectoplasm has sped up violently, forcing energy out of the small opening it has. He pauses in his task to open up two more knobs, lass afraid of the consequences of such a rash action now that he’s done it before. He’s frighteningly calm, riding the strange high of his success. He’s alone with Hannibal Lecter and they are free to talk.

There ins’t much they need to say though, and most of Hannibal’s energy is directed at Will’s task of digging a hole into frozen earth. He forces the shovel deeper and deeper into the ground each time, adding an extra kick to Will’s movement. They drift away from it together, as though watching their progress from afar, from behind a glass barrier.

And then Will stops, thrust abruptly back into his own mind. He checks the depth of the hole. It is uneven and roughly circular, but it doesn’t need to be pretty. It just needs to be deep. He know not how long a time they’ve been out here, daring nature to show what they know to be true of her: that she is equal parts benevolent and cruel, extending her horrifying and wrathful hand towards a costal city to be drowned by hurricanes while reaching out to scoop up a tree-covered mountain from the earth’s surface, giving life and peace to any who might dare to cross it.

She bends her great head down to them now, filling her lungs up with snow and bitter wind and exhaling a storm their way. The trees, though they are at the brink of death themselves as they are every year, bend inwards to shield them from her onslaught. And if they can make the forest move for them, she will back down.

Will drops the shovel with limp fingers, unable to properly process the ache in his limbs. He turns, halfway to being a ghost himself towards the jar and heaves it out of the snow, his Senses reacting on instinct. Hannibal’s been thrown off balance by the sudden action, like the floor beneath his feet has moved. There is little time to worry about that.

He sits cross-legged in the snow with the jar in front of him, doing his best to slowly twist open the knobs with sweaty, partially numb fingers. It feels as though someone is vigorously shaking the bones in his hands each time he turns a knob, the unpleasant radiation of psychic energy. He pauses, really stops to consider his next moves once he reaches the seventh and last knob on the lid.

He’s never gone this far before.

Hannibal immediately picks up on his hesitation, mild confusion and the threat of eventual hostility making themselves known. Will does what he can to calm him mentally in his bedraggled and delirious state. He can’t blame Lecter for this. He shouldn’t be out here. He shouldn’t be doing this. He’ll probably get sick. But he’s here, and he has an end of a bargain to hold up.

Trembling in the cold, Will stands above his messy hole in his messy snow suit in the middle of a forest, most likely in the early hours of the morning. Helios would not come marching over the horizon for another handful of hours and Selene would keep their secrets. For once, they have time. Will repositioned the jar in his arms so that his right is holding the jar’s bottom propped against his torso while it cradles the glass from underneath.

He’s turned the jar “upside down” so that the lid will fall open when the knob is opened with his free left hand. For a moment, Will stares into his partially illuminated hole and the snow lit bright blue around him. He takes a second to breathe. He pinches the seventh knob between trembling, sweaty, dirty, gloved fingers and twists with all his might.

———————

Many things happen at once.

The lid swings open and because of the position of the jar over the hole, the ectoplasm spills out, somewhere between liquid and gas in consistency. 

There is a blindingly bright flash of light across the forest, and Will swears it might have been a small explosion. 

There is a slight recoil from the jar as something very,  very  powerful shoots out of it, launching up into the air and whizzing around like a toy rocket. The air is suddenly alive with energy, crackling and popping like flames and making every breath Will takes in the subsequent minutes feel like a raw power surge through his lungs. It livens him like a defibrillator shock.

Something very heavy hits the ground, falling to the very bottom of the hole with a loud, wet  thud . The jar is suddenly devoid of much of its weight. 

Will drops the jar as well, stumbling away from the blast of ectoplasm. He knows better than to get near it. Falling into his own tracks, Will keeps his eyes screwed tight shut against the flare, the spotty red-orange of his illuminated eyelids still visible. Only after the light fades completely does he dare to open them, blinking away the spots in his vision. The jar is feet away in front of him, and a few feet in front of that in the messy, snow-dusted hole he’d dug, lit sharply by the blue flood of light still bathing the woods around them.

Something stick-like protrudes from it only slightly, a few points visible above the edge of the hole. However bright the area is, the object remains in darkness, or it remains dark: that’s the color, right? The statuette with the missing head was black. The stag’s head is free from the jar, along with the man bound to it.

Hannibal Lecter floats just feet above the ground, more radiant than Will has ever seen him. He practically outshines the North Star and it forces Will to shield his eyes from such a light. Hannibal stretches his arms outwards, arching his back and craning his neck so that he can properly face the sky. Will can feel the dead man’s muscles flexing and releasing months of pent-up tension as if it were his own.

He can feel his spine pop, vertebra by vertebra. He winds up, winds down, and the gears begin to turn again. The rust of the cogs falls away. Hannibal fixes his overly keen gaze on Will, and there is something very, very different this time. The lights blaze like focused beams, not faint stars. They burn holes into Will’s mind through his eyes.

A wind whips through the clearing, pushing Will further back into the snow. The dirt around the hole begins to shift, pulled into the center as if by a black hold positioned at the bottom, packing in around the decapitated stag’s head and layered over with snow. The top layer is smoothed out near-perfectly, if it weren’t for the debris around it.

Will ducks to avoid his shovel skittering across the surface of the snow and then lifting into the air, spinning towards him and coming to a screeching halt. It’s laid out in mid-air, horizontally like Hannibal’s presenting him with a sword. Without thinking, he takes it. There is a pregnant pause, one that lasts for an undefined amount of time. And then—

“Why mongoose?”

Will has about a hundred questions to ask Hannibal, and he would no doubt give an answer that would only inspire in Will a thousand more. But those are for another time. Will is still very much alive, and he does intend to see the light of the next day in resonantly good condition. So he chooses his words carefully.

It was never something he really thought about, the nickname ‘mongoose’.  Hannibal knows his name.

The man’s face warps a bit as he smiles, a tooth-grin that seems to complete his battered crater-eyes. He looks like a shark, the most gleeful, the most rawly emotional Will has ever seem him. But there is a melancholic note somewhere.

_ You were the mongoose I wanted under the house when the snakes slithered by. _

And Will, with the same melancholic note in his expression, returns the tooth-grin in his own shark-like mirror of the dead man before him. They have time. But not much. They squandered it a while ago on misgivings and insecurities and dissections of themselves. Oh, it would have been so much simpler if they had talked. But they still have bit of time left now. And so they stand and look and pick apart what they come across. They dance, very carefully, around the other. But Helios and Selene have places to be. So do they.

———————

Will’s hike home is faster than his trek out, though somewhat impeded by the fact that his tracks have been partially filled in by snow. The beam cast by his flashlight is no where near as bright as the light Hannibal provided, but it will do. Again, Will watches his increasingly bone-tired body shamble through the snow from far away, mulling over everything. Watching wave after wave crash to shore.

Perhaps a man had a charge once, and he could not protect her. 

Perhaps he was still young then.

Perhaps he found love, one way or another, in a daughter.

Perhaps she died by the hands of a monster who was larger than the one who’d taken her in. 

Perhaps he kept his promises.

And then he met a man made of mirror-glass, and he was surprisingly strong.

He knew the man could help him, and he thought he knew how.

The man made of glass would not want to.

The man made of glass was very good at mazes, at picking the strings of a tapestry apart.

Perhaps he was wrong. About a lot of things.

  
_But this_ _,_ Will thinks,  _is not a definite. They still have time to prove this one right._

Will considers this as the trees begin to thin and his windows shine like the lights of a boat as though he’s standing on a beach, watching the silhouettes of boats pass. He can feel the gently, cradling sway of the deck beneath his weary feet.


	34. Windows A(re)nd Doorways

Will has never slept so much in his life. Not when he was forced to remain in the hospital after a particularly nasty fall during an investigation, not during his leave time when he dreamt such vivid dreams. Never has he slept like this.

———————

_Will stepped wearily into his house, covered from head to foot in snow and dirt and worn down to the very marrow of his bones. He was sure ice had filled in the hollow portions, the little sponges holes, and cold had broken down his joints. He was perilously close to death with how frigid he was and he wouldn’t be surprised if frostbite had taken an appendage or two. But Will was lucky. What kind of luck it was and how lucky was debatable, but still._

_Lucky._

_He would have collapsed right then and there if it hadn’t been for his horde of dogs, shepherding him gently though his home as he tracked mud and dirt and slush into it, peeling off his snowy, sweaty clothing layer by layer. He’d dropped the empty jar and the shovel by his door, abandoning all but his current base instincts._

_He had enough sense left in him to guzzle down at least six cups of water before staggering into a shower far too hot for any sane person to enjoy, but it seemed to thaw out his frozen joints and restore the heat in his bones. He’d clean up tomorrow. The only non-essential detour he made was to fetch an armful of blankets and layer them haphazardly across his bed. The shower had warmed him up, but it had left his skin vulnerable to any minute temperature change._

_Will thought he might die there, drift away, smother himself in sleep. Curling up in his nest of blankets with the sounds of seven pairs of sleepy lungs at work, he fell deep into something just this side of a coma, not woken by his dogs the next morning or by the sun knocking on his window. He slept soundly that night without assistance, the first in an immeasurable amount of time._

_It was, for once, dreamless sleep._

_It was peaceful._

———————

Will wakes to the sounds of wining dogs, the soft clacking of nails on wood floors, and hot breath and wet noses in his face. He sneezes violently, jerking himself awake. It burns in his throat. The first thing he notices is Charlie, nosing at his hand hanging off of the bed with considerable distress. She’s grown exponentially in the past months, confirming Will’s assumption about her age. Of course she’s agitated. She’s young, she’s new. She cares.

The next thing he processes is the sun. It’s crept through the window far more than it should in the morning. It’s practically the middle of winter—although Will can’t really be relied on to know the date—but it shouldn’t be this bright, should it? Well, apparently it should because when he cranes his rather stiff neck to check the time, it’s somewhere around 10:00 and of course his dogs are hungry.

Winston is next to notice the fact that he’s stirred, padding over to his side of the bed and running into Charlie in the process. Startled, she jumps up onto the mattress to make room for him on the floor, unfortunately landing on top of Will and knocking the wind out of him. She rolls off of him and onto her back, tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth. She looks undeniably stupid, but painfully charming as well.

She’s also technically not allowed to jump on the bed, but in Will’s rather groggy state, her age, and given the time of day, it can be forgiven. With a horrendous amount of effort, Will staggers out of bed wrapped in one of his extra blankets and shuffles into the kitchen, setting to work prepping his dog’s food before he even considers his own. For once he forgoes coffee in favor of hot cocoa, something he bought ages ago but never really considered drinking. It was coffee or whiskey or water on occasion. Will starts considering the ludicrous idea of hydrating more often. He will make breakfast later.

It’s one of those mornings that’s both warm and bitterly cold at the same time. The heat of the sun and the dawn have reached you, but the cold ground still has a better hold on you that the warmth does. Will should make breakfast. He stares blankly out at the sun, already risen and above the tree line. He can pick a small family of deer out from between the trees. He thinks about Hannibal. He wonders if it is so wrong for him to want his freedom. He wonders about the cost.

Will should make breakfast. He should eat; his stomach complains profusely at the lack of food in contrast with the excess of work he’s done last night. He’s still barely conscious and his nose is blocked, something he only noticed after the warmth of the cocoa opened it up. He’s probably getting sick. He’s been stressed as of late, he lives in a house with seven dogs and walked a handful of miles into the woods last night in the cold. You can’t get sick via temperature changes and Will’s house and dogs in particular aren’t as disease-ridden as someone might think, but he wouldn’t put it past himself. Will should get inside. He nearly trips on the jar, still filthy from last night.

He does make breakfast for once. He doesn’t do much that day.

———————

In the days that follow, Will does find that he’s fallen ill and calls in sick, most likely a nasty cold. He knows it’s not really a cold—he’s recuperating from the last few weeks or so, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel and look like hell. He takes some time to clean up his room, drying the water on the floor and sweeping up the salt. He considers a rug for the spot on the floor that’s burnt slightly dark by the ectoplasm.

Jack’s first action once Will has returned is to call upon Dr. Chilton. So he noticed then, or someone did. He might have worried. Apparently, he’s cleared and not in any immediate danger, but he should be kept on watch to see if anything develops. Jack mentions assigning him a psychiatrist, namely one Dr. Alana Bloom. Will starts considering his sacrifices too.

The investigation into the disappearance of the ghost jar and its deadly occupant is kept tightly under wraps and out of the press for the duration of the activity around it. Will and everyone else involved are practically wrung for information, but he finds himself repeating his words each time. They come out rehearsed and exasperated each time. He goes home each day and calls the nice young man on watch duty.

He pities the poor boy for having to put up with him because he knows that he can hear the exhaustion and the irritability though the phone. The man assures Will that it’s fine, that he’s dealt with it before. Will notes with distance and displeasure the same strain of passiveness, the brush-off tone he takes. He makes note of it because he frequently uses a stronger strain of the same cadence, the flow and the curtness of the sentence’s end.

He goes home each day only to knock his foot against the jar, still covered in crusty dirt and debris. He has to do something about it. He stares at it blankly, the only thing left of that cut-out-in-reality’s-fabric feeling that Hannibal gave off when he lived in it. The hole has been patched up, but there are still stitches. There are still scars. He stares at it as he gives the man a rundown of his day, his emotions. He calls him again at 6:30. And again at 8:30. He calls him at 7:30 in the morning the next day and again once he gets to work.

They have him on what feels like suicide watch. In a way, Will thinks, it is. He’s deemed safe within the walls of the FBPI building apparently, seeing as the man does not call during work hours. After a few weeks of this cycle, they let him off the hook. What more can they do for him? To him?

Will still picks up the phone sometimes, but that habit fades quite quickly. He doesn’t stop looking at the jar. And then comes a night with nothing to do.

November and December have passed and tonight, Will finds, is New Years. The fireworks are especially loud out here. Things echo. There isn’t anything to combat the din. Will find himself with his dogs, lying dispiritedly on his bed. He thinks about the jar. It’s become this nagging thing at the back of his mind now like a test he half-knows the material for but should study just in case.

It’s New Years. He’s not going to sleep.

Fireworks, in past years, have been turned into strangely festive weapons against ghosts, apparently. They’ve packed the colorful explosives full of salt so that they burn and sparkle green in the sky and sparklers are made with lavender now, they even fizz in purple. It’s one of the few times people feel safe going out at night. There is light, for once. Safe, however, is still not a guarantee. Children, even with their sparklers, keep close to adults and adults in turn watch their young to ensure they don’t stray too far.

As another pop-crackle echos through the night, Will shuffles through his house towards the front door. He picks up the jar and takes it to the kitchen, flicking on the hot and cold taps and testing the temperature until it’s just right.

Will spends his New Years scrubbing away at the dirt and residue on the glass, listening to the sounds of fireworks and a green-lit sky. He likes to think it’s the aurora borealis, blooming across the firmament whenever a flash of emerald illuminates his countertop. It brings back the peace for a second.

———————

Will has left the jar in his room for the time being. He doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He’s slept relatively well as of late, but he’s not doing much field work. He hasn’t gone on an actual house call visit for weeks. The only time’s he’s woken are by his dogs, snuffling and snorting in their sleep or by something in the forest making a particularly loud call or cry. On those nights, Will wonders about Hannibal.

As the days go by, as the new year truly begins, Will’s mind drifts more and more frequently towards the jar and his options with it. He can’t go to the Hestia Furnaces, they deal with ghosts  in  jars, and often enough, those are returned to the owner. He can’t just toss it. It’s too risky. And so he thinks. And waits. And one day, as Will is watching the animals and figures turn and dance in tiny patterns on his silver mobile, he has an idea.

Will wonders if maybe  _ this _ is too risky. He doubts anyone who knows him will be at all surprised that’s he’s working on some new ghost-ward. They all know to a certain extent, whether they’re aware of the details or not. They know him. They keep away.

It’s a day without incident, one where Will doesn’t have to go in since he’s just finished consulting on a case without actually being there. The investigation is scheduled for the day after tomorrow. Will wonders if Jack will even consider having him go. He wonder if someone’s going to get fired once they tie up the strings of this whole debacle at some point. It hasn’t happened yet. But something will.

Will stares down at the clean jar in his hands and then out across the land, eyes locking on the point where the forest meets the clearing. The snow has long since melted, and though there are flurries here and there, most of the rest of winter will simple be chilly and frozen. The ground is still hard. Will has closed the door behind him, preventing his dogs from possibly hurting themselves. He has a plastic bin by his feet as he stands on his porch, ready, but not really.

It’s the feeling of inflating or squeezing a balloon. You know it’s going to pop and when, but not exactly. It’s different each time. Will raises the jar above his head, knowing it will take a handful of tries, and hurls it at the ground. It strikes the earth and cracks with a deafening snapping-gunshot sound. 

He’s not done yet.

Will jogs down the steps and scoops the jar up again, chucking it at the ground again. Shards of silver-glass fly like shrapnel away from him. He retrieves the jar again, repeating twice more before-

This time it really does sound like a gunshot. Well, part of it at least. When the glass cracks, the moment before the shattering spiderweb pattern splits it open, that’s when he hears it. The noise is sharp and swift and cut off part-way, a little shock to be overshadowed by the real jump-scare. The jar bursts like a popped balloon, like an egg thrown to the floor—it fractures and splits and collapses, throwing its fragments up into the air and away and outwards while collapsing in on itself and crumpling into the ground. Will flinches.

The glass won’t hit him, it doesn’t hit him. But he flinches anyway. And then there is the scared silence of after the balloon pops. The out breath of relief that it is over. Will grabs the plastic container and begins to very carefully pluck the shards of glass from the ground, dropping the newly-soiled fragments into it.

Over the next few days, Will stocks up on supplies he’ll need. He plans and lets his mind wander when he can permit himself to in the office. He wonders. He works at it each night—he has enough experience with metal to know what he’s doing at home. He’s made his own silver trinkets before. Metals aren’t respectable elements necessarily, but they are dangerous and should be respected. They are far more like their enemies than they think.

But it’s not quite time for that yet. He has to deal with the glass.  _ Finicky thing _ _,_ Will thinks as he sands down the edges of the glass shards one night, _picky. Troublesome, the corners of glass._ Each piece is ever so slight warped inwards or outwards, they roll and shift and arc between Will’s fingers. He assigns them their place in their neat metal frame, a sketch, a hard-lined pencil drawing, a soon-to-be portrait.

He picks and pokes as their positioning before securing them in their places, all arched outwards and warping the sunlight if you ever looked through them. He takes great care and time and waits for something to fall into place. It should not be rushed or hastened. Metal is patient. Glass is elegant. There is no way around it.

He threads the ropes through and is meticulous is his efforts to position their loops exactly so that the circular frames they hold become twins. He hangs them on an early spring day. Things have only just begun to wake, to bloom, to live again. Ever so carefully, Will hangs the twin dream catchers in front of his porch windows.

Their frames are made of iron, with flowers carved into them and silver-glass shards filling it in. There are iron strips that slip between them, supporting large collections of glass and holding them together. The light is warped as it passes through the glass, striking Will’s window in an odd way. Bunches of lavender are bound to the bottom, tied tight to the frame with some hanging downwards. They sway in the breeze.

The silver-glass shines in the spring sun.


	35. In The Woods Somewhere (Epilogue)

_Some people say the devil is in the woods.  
_

_They say he likes to run, but it is not he who does the running. Or at least is doesn’t look like him. They say if you dare to enter that forest, if you defy Nature’s warnings, you might see him. And make no mistake, you will be warned. You will be warned by a moonless, starless night. The east and west winds will wail and the north and south will howl. They will mourn for you, though they haven’t lost you yet. They hope to see you once more._   
  


_ The forest will not prove much of a challenge at first. But then it starts. Your first tip off won’t be something you can hear, but something you’ll breathe, and you  will know. _

_ The air will taste of lighting and each breath will be a shock. It is a heady, frightening sensation, akin to the feeling of your blood pressure readjusting after standing up to fast. Your eyes pound and you head swims and drowns. You’ll feel the earth quake underneath your feet. _

_ You will rumble with it. _

_ Sway. _

_And a light will peek through the tree somewhere, not on the ground, but high above, somewhere in the branches. It will tremble and shake with the earth as it grows near, and this is when that wretched noise echoes through the trees._

_It is an awful sound, horrid in every respect and a call that will weave terror into your very bones. It will follow you away from the forest when you run for your life, the sound, it will haunt you until your dying day._ _It sticks to you like scents do, whether it be that of decay or of sweet flowers and tea._

_As the light spills through the trees, it will begin to take the shape of a man. Some say a stag of some sort, a centaur, or maybe a man on horseback. They see him first._

_He takes many forms, the devil._

_He clings tight to the neck of a stag, riding side-saddle and bareback, wisps of light trailing behind him. He looks like a comet or maybe a falling star, but only from far away; when he grows close you would be wise to run, to cover your eyes, to flee._

_Well, we wouldn’t know if someone hadn’t, would we?_

_Perhaps it was his time in the wild, in the cold and dark and solidarity except for the company of animals, but he has been made ghastly and fearsome by the passage of the years.Perhaps that shaped the form he takes today. Maybe he was always like this. We know so little about his kind._

_But as he descends through the canopy he grows dark. He appears as though lit from behind, a bright blue-white outlining the darkness that consumes him and his steed._

_Is some tellings he wears long robes, in others he’s dressed in a suit, dark as the stag he rides. But as he passes you he will level a stare that would knock god down from his pedestal and slaughter his high horse to boot. This man believes in god, but he is by no means god-fearing. It will bore holes through you, pull gently at heartstrings and sanity before ripping it away, leaving it for you to find (if you can) in the woods somewhere._

_He moves by, quick as blinking, but I swear he even has antlers like the stag. Terrible, beautiful things, like a crown. The antlers catch fire and the light behind him dies as he passes you, and that it throws his face into sharpe relief._

_He is most definitely human._

_And then he rides off, the light from behind him fading and the fire being the only indicator that he was there. That, and a faint breath of wind. After a time, that vanishes too._

_But cold, draining fear does not set in then. It arrives just after the devil departs, and it comes with the sound of horrid, heavy hooves and the sickly whoosh of fetid air, of decay. He moves faster than sound and smell._

_Often enough, the devil is not alone._

_The devil’s companion rides alongside him, racing him. He rides like his partner and he too wears a crown of antlers. Some doubt he is merely a companion. No one dares to outride Lucifer like he does. They are equals, what else might they be?_

_And if there are two of them, then we must pray that they have not reached heaven yet with how long they’ve been riding for they would take the throne with ease if they did. A horde of dogs chase the heels of the second man’s steed, their hellish barking echoing for far longer than it should. His antlers catch fire and the light behind him dies as he passes._

_People often wonder about him. Anyone from internet sleuths to formal investigators have researched it if they’ve come across this case and turned up nothing. No violent or tragic deaths have occurred in or around the forest or the small, dilapidated property near it._

_People wonder about the pair. Theories range from a man fallen victim to a violent visitor to lost members of the wild hunt, separated from their hunting party forevermore. They wonder. I think they’re wrong. I don’t know what is right either, but I doubt a man fallen victim to the devil would beat him in a a race._

———————

As each day passes, Will wonders less and less about Hannibal. He wonders less because he sees more. On late nights when the moon is fat and full, especially in winter, Will might catch a glimpse of a silhouette poking through the trees. A beacon of blue-white light shining at him, _directly_ _at him_. The figure tilts his head to the side and then turns away, running off into the trees.

In the winter, he is a sight to see. He stretches and streamlines and warps until he is unrecognizable through the forest, and then he is  very distinct . There is no more man, only a stag dashing faster than any animal should around,  through each obstacle. He runs, and like a shark, it keeps him breathing.

Will considers the nightly company he keeps. He decides that, at the very least, he and Hannibal are better for it. Will can tell he is alive. He is alive and he is free.

And then his disappears, deep into the woods somewhere. Sometime, Will catches the cry of a fox or bird as he vanishes. When this happens he wonders about the souls trapped within the confines of the office, the house. That cursed house.

Who knows if they actually died there, who knows what happened to poor Abigail there, because something most definitely happened. They were pulled towards him like objects nearest a black hole, spinning slowly around it, the gravity tugging them closer and closer, faster and faster in a terrible spiral. Will wonders what might happen to him when he dies.

It is the thing he wonders about when he can’t sleep at night. Surely he will not be able to rest.

Will he walk into the forest as well?

———————

_The devil is in the woods._

_He does not prey or bite or maul. He hunts. He stalks the woods on mounted patrol, he rides on wind and moonbeams. He leaves no tracks in the snow. The nightmarish stag he rides falls like a star through the tangle of dried branches and scraping fingernails but it breaks nothing, disturbs nothing, not a sound is made. Or at least they moves faster than it, somehow._

_Lucifer lost his Light-Bringer title when he fell._

_He was not alone when he fell either._

_The devil is very rarely seen alone. His pack leader, his companion, his equal. He leads a horde of hunting dogs, and their barking sounds like the fearsome growling of wolves and bears as he passes alongside his hellish consort, just as silent, just as fleet-footed. They come and they go, they leave nothing behind._

_And if you are foolish enough to stick around after they pass, they will chase you down. They will chase you out. These are their hunting grounds, these woods, the land around it. They own this. We know not why they are here or how, but it seems now that these woods have always been strange._

_Well, not always. But they became that way. The trees began claw at you weakly as you passed, whether it be in summer or winter. The entire area began to change as if it was on its own clock; spring came later and autumn arrived early. Still, the canopy seems oddly thick, oddly dark to have grown back so slowly. But who is to say that it is their fault? It is, we know it is, but who can say for sure?_

_And so those woods have been left alone. No one dares to venture there for the paths of the forest move. People get turned around, even in daylight, and some haven’t found their way back. No agency will go near it. And so the cursed wood and the cursed land around that wood are left to themselves._

_However strange the natural clock of the area is, however, there is plenty of fauna around. Birds sing until the sun goes down and there is no shortage of foxes or rabbits or deer._

_They live undisturbed there, that hollow, the patch of land where Dante first met the beasts that deterred him, where he encountered Virgil. Where he left for Hell. Who is to say Hell is not in those woods?_

_The devil is in the woods and he is not alone._


	36. Author’s Note

Hello all! I’d just like to thank everyone who’s left kudos and comments and anyone who’s simply gone window shopping at my little corner store of horrors. Writing and creating in general (I do a lot of art in my spare time) have gotten me through a lot of the ups and downs of 2020 and this year in particular has been pretty terrible for me. I lost someone very close to me—though not to the virus—while I was writing, and it sort of became something I could lean on.  Being able to regurgitate a paragraph or two onto a page, edit it, and post it was a reliable process. It still is.

And to think that people out there enjoy it is the most amazing feeling. The constructive criticism, the breakdowns, the simple “Wow, this chapter was really cool!”’s have carried me a long way. The fact that this idea, the AU and the possibility of actually writing it started with what would fall under the category of crack fics is hilarious to me now that I’ve come this far. That people take it seriously, that they enjoy it and look forward to updates brings me unimaginable happiness in such a frightening and chaotic time.

So this is a thank you, a virtual hug and a smile to everyone who’s read this, is reading this, and will eventually read it.

Now, for future plans. I’m not quite sure what I want to do next. I’ve got a few things in mind, but I’m most likely going to go on hiatus for a bit to figure out what I want to do. In the mean time, I might start a book of headcannons or one-shots for ships I’m interested in, but I also want to balance that with larger projects or original stories and maybe even post some of my art in the future. Requests, recommendations as to what to do next, and advice from seasoned readers and writers is welcomed and requested.

Sadly, this is goodbye for now, but not forever!

Best,

Chaos


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